


we never were good at doing what we're told

by elliptical



Series: hey, i just had an interesting thought. actually, fuck fate [1]
Category: Call Down the Hawk - Maggie Stiefvater, Dreamer Trilogy - Maggie Stiefvater, Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Mental Health Issues & Suicidal Ideation, Established Relationship, Eventual Happy Ending, Everyone loves each other very much but manages to be very confused and sad about it, Gen, Healing, M/M, Magical Tattoos, Platonic Relationships, Platonic Soulmates, Polyamory, Relationship Negotiation, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, past trauma, with some fluff!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:35:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 104,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22741873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elliptical/pseuds/elliptical
Summary: Adam liked looking at Ronan’s soul marks. He liked it in a genuine, unironic way that wasalmostdevoid of vicious jealousy.-In which Adam doesn't have a soulmate but does have a boyfriend and is terrified of impending disaster; Ronan has a lot of soulmates and is terrified that maybe he's fated to non-autonomous misery; and Hennessy only has one soulmate, which definitely, unequivocally, 100% means she's going to ruin him forever.
Relationships: Ronan Lynch & Adam Parrish & Hennessy, Ronan Lynch & Hennessy, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish, Various background polyamory
Series: hey, i just had an interesting thought. actually, fuck fate [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2136597
Comments: 410
Kudos: 465





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> take note of the suicidal ideation warning

Adam laid on his side and watched the early morning sun creep over his boyfriend’s skin until his soul marks blazed.

It was a metallic, glittering glory. It was a ripple of reflection in a pond or blade. It was a smattering of universe-rendered tattoos that had begun shadowed in silhouette, the same way everyone's began. One person’s skin brushed another’s, the universe sang in harmony, and the world offered a helpful hint as a tattoo colored in. Flesh became a canvas tracking which soulmates you’d met and which remained a jittery mystery.

Adam liked looking at Ronan’s soul marks. He liked it in a genuine, unironic way that was _almost_ devoid of vicious jealousy. The morning light was beautiful, and so was the pattern of shadows cast by the rumpled sheets, and so was Ronan. Adam had decided several years back to appreciate simple pleasures wherever he found them.

So there was this simple pleasure: Ronan, naked and wrapped in bedsheets like a parody of hubris, his arms buried under the pillow, chest pressed to the mattress, snoring with wild abandon. The delicate silver brush strokes of the shimmery forest that sprouted from his collarbone and halfway up his neck. The haphazardly sketched abstraction of a ruffled wing, covering an entire shoulder blade in cool watercolors. Other markings that couldn’t be seen fully from this angle, like a hint of scarlet spatter at his hip that disappeared beneath the blankets.

Ronan had more soulmates than the average person. He’d also met most of them much younger than the average person, which was a blessing or a tragedy depending on who told the story.

There was, in fact, only one marking left to hint at future upheaval rather than past revelation. It snagged Adam's attention despite his best efforts. This marking he had a slightly more complicated relationship with for a whole host of reasons, none of which were fair, and none of which he’d lay on a conscious Ronan.

But it was better to get the thoughts out of his head now, while Ronan was still asleep, so he let himself look. The marking was a sketch layered in graphite and charcoal. There was no shimmer of color or glitter, because Ronan hadn’t yet touched the person it belonged to. All the same, it was a careful and rapturous detailing of curled flower petals, layers upon layers of them curved over Ronan’s non-winged shoulder. The depth and contrast rendered them silky enough to touch.

Adam reached over and traced his fingertips across the silhouette. The image was all illusion, of course; the texture of Ronan’s skin remained the same as it always had. And the petals remained gray as they always had.

It was one of those mornings, apparently, when the reality of the sunlight and the apartment and the comfortable sheets and the sleepy boyfriend and the stable future conspired to lodge choking sadness in Adam’s throat.

This happened occasionally. He’d get over it. And also promptly become annoyed with himself for indulging such useless self-pity.

“Parrish,” Ronan murmured, startling Adam out of his self-imposed flagellation. “Stop being neurotic.”

Adam drew his hand back, guilty as charged.

Ronan’s voice had a sleepy, slow cadence that meant there was a fifty percent chance he’d have no memory of this conversation later. “I want coffee. I want so much coffee.” A contemplative pause. “I want a bagel. Two bagels.”

Adam could have pointed out that he wasn’t a slave to Ronan’s breakfast whims, which tended to resemble the impulse control of a toddler left unattended with the maple syrup. But a breakfast run to the coffee shop two blocks down _would_ favorably dispose Ronan to him for pretty much the whole day, and Adam was ready to get out of this apartment and his own head. Plus, bagels and coffee were incredibly normal requests by Sleep Ronan's standards.

He leaned over, kissed Ronan’s temple, and extricated himself from the comfy mattress to go earn a boyfriend of the year award.

-

Adam stood on the apartment balcony and let the rising sun paint the city below with a washed-out haze. His coffee cup, balanced on the railing, contained a hazardous number of espresso shots plus a halfhearted attempt at mercy through caramel sweetening. Brief melancholy aside, it was shaping up to be a good day. A rare lazy day.

The door slid open behind him, and then Ronan’s warm arms wrapped around his waist, chest pressed to his back. For someone who had yet to brush their teeth, Ronan sure did think a lot of his ability to nuzzle and kiss and nip at and occasionally suck on Adam’s neck. Granted, he was right, but that wasn't the point.

“You’re a menace to society,” Adam informed him, not unhappily.

Ronan blew a raspberry against his skin, which made Adam laugh helplessly and swat at Ronan’s arms.

“I’m braving hell for you, you bastard,” Ronan said, in the same tone one might use to woo a lover under moonlight. “Every day you come stare into the abyss. Every day I must subject my eyes to fire and stabbing to pull you back from the brimstone.”

“That’s one hell of a way to describe sitting in a plastic chair, drinking coffee, and getting fresh air.”

“The _sun."_

“Yeah, yeah, the sun.” Adam picked up his cup and drained what was left of the beverage in a few quick swigs. “You’re real turned on by me getting you bagels, huh?”

“I find it,” Ronan said, nosing behind Adam’s ear in a way much more doglike than hot, just to make Adam laugh again, “unbelievably fucking sexy.”

“Well, then,” Adam said, “I guess we better go back inside.”

-

The thing was: Adam Parrish didn’t have several soulmates. Adam Parrish didn’t even have one. Adam Parrish’s skin had been eternally unshadowed except for freckles and adolescent acne. There would be no life-altering touch, no instantaneous connection, no intrinsic value to strangers. There would be no obligations, and there would be no rewards. Of every presumed-shit hand for life to deal, an eternal guarantee of his own independence was far from horrible. 

Except for when it stung.

The thing was: These days, Adam drifted closer and closer to forgetting that he didn’t have a soulmate. What he’d built here with Ronan - and what he’d built in the rest of his life with Gansey and Blue and Noah - felt so natural and immutable that it was easy to forget he wasn’t supposed to have it at all.

The thing was: That was _fucking terrifying._

In the rational portion of his mind, he firmly believed that his lack of soul marks was a blessing, not a curse. It was confirmation that he was a whole person who didn’t need to rely on anyone else. It was a promise that there was no interpersonal loss that could damage him too deeply to survive. It was a guarantee that he was protected from the kind of stupid horseshit that everyone else suffered trying to define and explain their bonds.

In the irrational portion of his mind, it hurt like fuck that some stranger already had a claim and connection to Ronan that Adam couldn’t get with a literal lifetime of companionship.

And, though he recoiled from the conscious thought, it hurt like fuck that Adam would never be responsible for anything as beautiful as those flower petals, and it hurt like fuck that so many beautiful and kind and wonderful people could be made for Ronan, and Adam hadn't been worth a single one of them.

“Parrish,” Ronan said, late in the afternoon, when they’d managed to waste most of the day, “you’re drifting on me.”

This was why they were not soulmates: When they'd first met, Ronan would never have known that Adam had a tendency toward drifting, let alone how to catch it happening.

This was why Adam kept forgetting: because with years of careful study, they’d both learned.

Ronan laid his hand against Adam’s cheek. “What can I do?”

“I’m okay. Sorry. I’m not trying to cause problems. I’m here.”

Ronan, plainly dissatisfied by this response, rolled his eyes and ran his fingers through Adam's hair.

Adam tucked his head against Ronan's chest and spent some time self-soothing with his favorite coping mechanism: pretending not to have feelings.

When he accidentally dozed off, he woke with a jolt to the sound of Ronan’s late shift alarm going off. Night had blanketed the world, he’d lost the entire evening, and Ronan’s arms were carefully curled around him like he hadn’t dared to move for hours.

-

If you believed in yourself and made a real goddamn effort, it was possible to escape the artificial lights and constant roar of engines on a regular basis, even living in an urban apartment from hell.

Ronan picked up farmwork outside the city not so much because he needed the money as because he needed the sanity. The most ideal periods were the ones when he could find shifts that started hours before sunup. Best were the places that let him muck around doing chores in hay-smelling barns and shit-smelling fields that weren’t flooded by industrial brightness.

This was a balancing act well worth the results, in his opinion. Two subway trains to the city outskirts where his car was parked, a half hour drive in peace and quiet under the stars, a happy home waiting when he got back. A chance for Adam to thrive somewhere rife with job opportunities and things to see and people to meet and experiences to have.

Ronan made a point of lacking emotional availability in public. He’d discovered that the grating stimulation and drain of the city lessened when he could control it, so he strode down sidewalks and rode trains from a bubble of noise-cancelling headphones. The subway platform wasn’t busy at one AM, though. He’d hooked the headphones around his neck and was avidly tracking the strut of a pigeon beside a magazine stand when the low rumble of the approaching train growled below his feet.

He looked up and saw a girl poised to jump.

There was no time to pause, consider the situation, categorize all the warning signs. He just knew what she was about to do, certain to the marrow of his bones, and he sprinted the short gap between them and closed his fingers around her wrist and yanked her back over the caution line.

She staggered into him as the train hurtled into the station. The doors whisked open, the hiss whooshing over his voice.

“What the fuck?” Ronan demanded.

She righted herself and met his gaze, all smudged makeup and snarl, her teeth bared with more defensiveness than anyone strolling off a subway platform seemed reasonably entitled to. And then her eyes flicked to his shoulder, and her lips parted in either shock or horror.

Ronan knew. His fingers were still curled around her arm, skin-to-skin contact a magic charm for self discovery. He knew. He looked anyway, like a fatally wounded movie hero assessing their mortality. The portion of the silhouetted flower that he could see was shot through with red and gold, threads widening like sunset or lava or an explosion.

He searched her exposed skin - there was quite a lot of it - for a mark. And there, there, a tangle of thorns and vines licking up her side in spreading dense greens.

“Shit-" they both said, an aborted exclamation, jinx-you-owe-me-a-soda. Immediate proof of bond, probably, an incongruously hilarious moment so at odds with Ronan’s current internal scream that his focus slipped entirely.

The second his grip weakened, she wrenched her arm free. Her fingers curled around her backpack straps. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, but she stepped sideways and flashed him a grin of razor teeth.

And then his final soulmate turned on the heel of her very impractical, very stylish boots, and bolted.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ronan meets hennessy, which is to say he chases her into a subway bathroom.  
> hennessy meets ronan, which is to say she threatens him at knifepoint.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter warning: i initially had a more detailed warning here, but upon reread, the content is fairly tame since things are just mentioned instead of discussed in depth. the tone is more explicit about mental health problems, suicidality, & drug use than trc, but it's about on the same level with cdth.

Hennessy hadn’t dressed to run for her life.

If she’d been wearing sneakers, she could have put distance between herself and her _soulmate_ without a problem. He might have a head on her in height, but she had a survivalist streak that had served her well up until it had worn her out, which meant that with sneakers she could have vaulted up the station steps and disappeared into the night before he reached the sidewalk.

As it was, he’d catch her halfway up. She thought about simply screaming for help, but she wasn’t one to entrust her fate to apathetic middle-of-the-night strangers on a city street. Instead, she made a sharp detour for the women’s room. In the best timeline, there’d be a few drunk girls inside who’d kick up a ruckus at his intrusion.

This was not the best timeline. Multiple stalls in the shitty, flickering-light setup. All of them empty.

The thud of his boots followed her inside. Her own heels clicked against the tiles, reverberating echolocation between the stalls. She’d cold clocked people with stall doors in the past, on three separate and efficient occasions, but the size of him didn’t bode well. He’d stagger, but he might not fall.

She stopped in front of the sinks rather than allowing him to corner her. Reached into her bralet. Thud, thud, closer, closer, until his presence shivered against her spine. Then she turned to impart a benevolent lesson about getting in her fucking space. The tip of the pocketknife she’d drawn settled smoothly in the space between his ribs, an imminent threat to his lungs, and she felt her shoulders relax.

He stilled. Most men did, three inches between breath and death.

“I don’t mean to be unfriendly, mate,” she said, “but I just don’t have the time.”

“Looks to me like you’ve got more time than you did ten minutes ago,” he countered.

“Oh, is that what you’re waiting for?” She pressed the blade harder against his skin. The tank top he wore wasn’t built to resist weapons; the knife tip sheared easily through the fibers. Even so, he didn’t flinch as she nicked his skin. _“Thank you,_ you benevolent god, you.”

“Either stab me or don’t,” he said. “I don’t have patience for horseshit.”

She searched his eyes and found frostbite. His curled lip and narrow gaze weren’t ideal for dancing her way out of the situation, sleight of hand and sarcastic quips. She thought, for a moment, about the merits of shoving the blade in. Puncturing an internal organ or two and leaving him gasping for stolen breath on the dirty tile floors. She could scream for help on the platform before she ran and increase his chances of survival, or she could melt into the shadows and let him become a corpse to startle the next drunk girl who wandered in here. Either way, she doubted he’d come looking for her again.

He hadn’t committed any crime except saving her life.

She wasn’t going to be this person.

She'd give anything to stop being this person.

She pulled the knife away, ran it underneath the tap to rinse a tiny smear of blood, closed it, and tucked it back into her bralet for safekeeping. He didn’t grab her once she was unarmed. He just stood like a bodyguard, arms folded over his chest, the pinnacle of glowering irritation. He looked dangerous. The kind of guy who might have intrigued her if she was in the mood for glitter-sharp self-destruction instead of oblivion.

“So,” she said.

“So.” 

He appeared as uninterested in initiating the conversation as she was, but she didn’t think he’d dropped his guard. If she tried to run, he’d pursue. Again.

She watched his reflection in the mirror disbelievingly as he pulled out his phone. “Are you calling the cops?” she demanded.

He let out a derisive snort. When this didn’t mollify her, he said, “Do I look like a fucking idiot? I’m texting my boyfriend.”

He didn’t look like a fucking idiot. He looked like an angry white boy who was out of his depth and pissed about being threatened at knifepoint. Hennessy supposed it was possible that his lack of cop calling had more to do with a deep-seated intention of killing her and burying her in a public park, but the words settled something inside her all the same. 

She let her gaze slip from his reflection to her own and grimaced. The creature staring back was an armored animal whose shell had begun to crack. Her makeup was a mess, partly because she’d only done it well enough to slip away unnoticed. Shadows under her eyes that half a pound of layered concealer and foundation couldn’t erase, smudgy eyeliner to make the haggard fatigue a fashion statement, lipstick that had rubbed onto her teeth, hair slipping from its ponytail in unkempt coils around her face. She yanked the elastic fully free. This was not Hennessy, warrior queen and take-no-shit badass. This was some strung-out, washed-up has-been about to do a stint on a reality rehab flick. She hadn’t expected anyone to be forced to look at this face except the cops identifying the body and maybe -

Her breath sharpened. Her reflection wavered in the mirror, and then she realized that she was trembling, so she curled her hands around the sink to still them. She’d felt steadier with the knife between her fingers.

He tucked his phone in his pocket, apparently finished with his text, and met her eyes through the mirror.

“This is not going to be a love story,” she told him.

 _That_ made him laugh. It was mirthless, sharp, the kind of sound that belonged in a wildlife documentary right before the predator made a kill. It did not indicate a future full of kittens and gentle embraces. It also made her like him more.

“Fucking obviously,” he said.

-

There had been a time, back before her mother died, when Hennessy had been delighted by fantasies about her soulmate.

These fantasies were largely not her own. She’d been a child - what did she know about lifetime bonds? She should have spent more time playing in the dirt and making a mess of herself and creating proper youthful memories, like Jordan. But her single thorny soul mark captured their mother’s whimsy more than Jordan’s multiple abstracted silhouettes, and so she’d become the favorite twin on account of all the fucking inspiration.

“A prince hacking through a magical forest to rescue you from wicked monsters,” JH would say, skittering her fingers over Hennessy’s ribs until she squealed with laughter. “Or a beautiful lady sleeping in an enchanted glen, woken with a kiss.”

At the time, Hennessy trusted in her mother’s wisdom. Though she’d been a child, she was old enough to know that the story wouldn’t follow any of the literal fairytales that JH proffered. But she still believed in the spark of magic that tied individuals together. One day, the silhouetted vines would bloom, and on that day, everything in her world would align into perfection. After all, that was how it had happened for her parents.

Then her mother died when her father stopped being the prince hacking through magical forests, because it turned out that this was the real world, where sometimes the universe handed floaty artists a negligent car salesman for a soulmate and told them to do the heavy lifting, or where an average car salesman ended up saddled with a lapful of crazy he’d never be able to handle.

Hennessy’s expectations realigned themselves accordingly. What kind of person would be represented by a knotted thicket of thorns? Either someone vicious enough to sting through her armor, or someone she’d choke to death to keep the plants from ruining the shallow soil.

Ronan Lynch seemed to fit the bill.

The one blessing in the situation was that his thorniness wasn’t hidden. He wore all of his impatience and potential cruelty on the outside. If he’d been someone else, someone who offered bland smiles and made small talk and tried to win her heart with glistening eyelashes, she’d have driven herself crazy waiting for the sting to emerge from the roses.

She hated that fucking flower on his shoulder.

“I’m gonna feel better when we’re somewhere without trains or cars or ledges,” he said, and getting rid of him didn’t appear to be an option, so that was how they ended up in a twenty-four hour diner eight blocks away.

-

They stayed in the diner for two hours.

This didn’t indicate a series of heart-to-heart conversations. Over half of that time was spent inside a bubble of glowering, challenging silence. But it was two hours where she could focus on fighting, because she wasn’t about to let her soulmate crack her open just because he was her soulmate, and maybe that meant she was fighting for her life, and maybe it didn’t fucking matter who she was fighting or what she was protecting. Two hours undefined by apathetic misery. She didn't particularly enjoy them, but she came away without a desire to scrub the time from her brain.

Two hours was enough to establish baselines. Names: her last, his full. That she was not going to a hospital or calling a hotline or putting up with an intervention, which he appeared to know from the get-go; his reaction edged closer to "annoyed and resigned" than "earnest." That she would not answer questions, and if he asked too many she’d take off her boots and bolt barefoot. That he had some kind of crazy-person history to rival hers and the battle scars as proof.

Two hours was enough to make her tired. Ronan had the persistence of an endurance predator. She'd been an endurance predator once, too, but it had been a long-ass while. He probably could have exhausted her enough to drop her in the emergency room. But he’d abandoned that possibility as soon as she first rejected it. Maybe because he was weak-willed, or maybe because he’d intuited that she could lie her way out of the situation the second she’d caught enough shut-eye.

What happened was she got tired, and the adrenaline high wore off, and the unhappiness crowded back in, and when he asked to bring her home, she told him she’d kill him before she gave him her address. And when he asked to bring her to _his_ home, she said, “As long as I’m unconscious, you can do whatever the fuck you want.”

It came out irritatingly sincere. The lack of bite might have been why he paused and then said, carefully, “I’m not going to hurt you, you enormously crazy fuck.”

She hadn’t been seeking reassurance, but she accepted it with a wave of her hand, and then she let him pay the bill, and then he called a rideshare, and she barely registered getting into the car because the tiredness hit like anesthesia.

-

Ronan spent the ride to the apartment pondering the fact that he might be the worst person alive. These stolen minutes were the only time he’d get to be unsure of himself. He couldn’t waver around Adam, and he definitely couldn’t waver around Hennessy; uncertainty was for people who could afford to make mistakes.

She slept against his shoulder from the minute their seatbelts clicked, wholly and gloriously passed the fuck out. Coils of her hair tickled his nose and ear as he leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.

The drive was just long enough to calm his racing thoughts and compartmentalize his doubts. As the car stopped in the parking garage, he shifted, which elicited no response. Then he nudged her more aggressively, and she stirred and blinked at him with bleary incomprehension.

“Home sweet home,” he said, inflectionless.

To her credit, she did get out with both backpack and purse intact, and she did manage to stand for about a minute. But that appeared to be an act of sheer willpower, because the second there were no other witnesses, her knees folded.

Ronan caught her under the arms. “Do I have to carry you?” he asked. “Because I will. But I am absolutely fucking not dragging a semiconscious chick through my building without being one hundred percent irre-fucking-proachable.”

Hennessy looked up. Her gaze was sleepy but clear, no reds in her eyes or blues around her lips. “Sure thing, Prince Charming,” she said. “I’m lazy.”

“That’s one word for it,” he grunted, and hauled her up against his chest.

This was how Ronan ended up carrying an inebriated-looking girl in very revealing clothing from the parking garage’s elevator across the apartment lobby, attracting a stare from the underpaid previously-dozing employee behind the counter, because the _fucking_ management wouldn’t even abandon the place at three in the _fucking_ morning. If he’d been Gansey, he could have offered friendly excuses. Since he was Ronan, he held challenging eye contact and curled his lip, because that was the most surefire way to get upstairs unaccosted. He did muse, as the keycard-activated elevator doors closed, that "silent threat" might not have been the best call. Although it _had_ worked.

After ten thousand fucking years, Ronan made it out of the elevator, through the empty hallway, and into the unit. First order of business: to dump Hennessy on the couch and shake out his arms. “God,” he said aloud. Farmer accustomed to hauling feed sacks or not, she was fucking _heavy._

Hennessy grumbled something incoherent, pawed at her backpack until it was cradled against her stomach instead of her back, and slumbered on.

“Oh, God,” Adam said, exiting the bathroom. His hair was wet, and a cloud of steam followed him, but he’d pulled his regular clothes back on. Which seemed to negate the purpose of the shower. “Did you knock her out?”

This mildly offended Ronan. "Mildly" because knocking a suicidal person unconscious as an impulsive rescue-measure-slash-avoidance-tactic sounded _exactly_ like something he’d do, so he couldn't get too irritated.

“She’s fine.” Wryly, he added, “People sleep at night, Parrish.”

“Did she _take_ something?” Adam pressed his knuckles to his forehead. “I told you fifty times this was a bad idea. You know how to read texts, right? You heard the fifty times I said this was a bad idea? I’m gonna call an ambulance.”

“She’s _fine.”_

“You don’t know that!”

“Yes, I do.”

“Oh, what, did she _promise?_ Cross her heart? Somehow I don’t think she _gives a shit_ if she _dies_ on our _couch.”_

Ronan was aware, in both the rational part of his mind and the part of his heart that had been with Adam for ages, that this was Adam’s stress manifesting as anger. Unfortunately, Ronan’s own stress tended to manifest the same way.

“Parrish,” he said, stringing together a fraying thread of calm like a skilled mythological weaver about to challenge the gods, “If you don’t back off, I’m gonna lose my shit.”

This was not a threat so much as a factual statement. Adam pressed his hand harder into his forehead. Ronan watched him breathe out, exhaling every molecule of air inside his lungs, a ten-second mental cleansing. “Tell me how you know she’s fine,” he said.

“Pupils aren’t dilated,” Ronan said immediately. He ran through the points like a checklist, easy to formulate since he'd been compiling every bit of data since she first passed out. “Eyes aren’t red. Skin isn’t clammy or cold or feverish. Can’t see any blue or discoloration. Although,” he added, “I guess maybe the makeup would throw it off. Don't know fucking shit about, uh, the merits of overpriced face goop. Pulse is normal. Speech is normal. Breathing’s normal. I don’t know what’s up with her, but she’s honest-to-God asleep.”

As he spoke, Adam calmed the way Ronan knew he would, the way he always did when an argument was presented with impartial facts rather than moral objectives. Ronan disliked needing to convince Adam that his instinctive impulses were correct, but it had in the past saved him from a few _incorrect_ impulses.

Adam tilted his head. “You’ll bet her life on it?” Even, assessing.

Ronan was pretty sure that calling for help would forfeit her life faster than rolling the dice and hoping she woke. “Yeah.”

“Okay.” Adam did not point out that Ronan was now culpable if this was a mistake; they both knew that. Ronan had been culpable before. Adam was just making sure he'd acknowledged it.

Ronan exhaled himself. He must have breathed too hard, because he ended up dizzy. “Okay,” he said, bracing an arm on the back of the couch.

Adam crossed the room, hesitant, and reached up to brush Ronan’s cheek, holding his fingers there. “I am not okay with this,” he said. It was his Principle Voice, the one he used when he needed to make his position clear lest he lay awake haunted by the perils of indirect communication.

“I know,” Ronan said. This was his Passive Voice, which he used when he had no intention of budging but didn’t want to escalate the argument.

Each silently acknowledged the meaning in the other’s Voice. This was a stalemate that would, inevitably, be picked up again at a more opportune time. They'd gotten good at setting fights aside when more pressing issues required attention.

“Okay,” Adam said. “Give me something to do. I can’t sit around here wringing my hands. I need something to do.”

Ronan considered. “You could go tell the desk guy that I’m not a kidnapper. Or trafficker. Or organized crime boss. Or planning to murder him.”

“God,” Adam said.

“And then go wherever the hell you want. I’m not gonna interrogate you if you need to vanish for a few hours.”

Adam slid his hand from Ronan’s cheek to the back of his neck. “I really could kill you sometimes,” he said, wonderingly, and tugged Ronan’s face down to peck him on the mouth. Then he made his way to the door, grabbing his leather jacket from the hook. “I’m gonna go put out your fires,” he said. “Text me if you need me.”

He left quietly, the latch clicking behind him.

Ronan removed the conflict from his mind - no use brooding over a situation he’d fix later - and sat down on the floor in front of the couch. He flicked on the television, a rarely-used piece of wall-mounted technology that existed solely for social gatherings. It rumbled and flashed in the background, and he waited for Hennessy to wake, and he listened carefully to her breathing, and he did not move, and he prayed he wasn't fucking up, and he couldn’t have named a single program he watched.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i initially had a really long end note but have decided it wasn't warranted. this was a tough chapter to write. one thing to note is that this is not a by-the-book guide for dealing with crises & shouldn't be read as a model for what to do in a similar irl situation. the characters' varying reactions are based on their neuroses & prior experiences with available resources.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ronan explains most of his soul marks  
> hennessy smells secrets

Hennessy woke with the thrashing wail of a sad, wet caricature in a low-budget informational video about post-traumatic stress. She woke with sweat soaking her skin, with serrated breath in her lungs, with an adrenaline-shocked heart. She woke like a shuttle pilot watching their craft crumple inward as they entered the atmosphere.

The drama meant that she’d already compromised her surroundings. She registered the soft, uneven lumps of couch cushions and the laced-tight pressure of her boots, and her mind automatically labeled the situation: couch surfing, crashing, squatting, about to get kicked out of IKEA.

Then a blanket dropped over her body, fleecy and heavy and warm. She shook her head hard to descramble her synapses. Ronan Lynch stood behind the couch, the fabric-wielding benefactor. The room was flooded with sunlight. Beams poured through the sliding glass door and windows like an attack, jabbing into her eyes.

She turned her face away from the brightness, shaking, shaking.

“You sleep like a goddamn rock,” Ronan said. “You should twitch next time. I’ll dump water on your head.”

Hennessy did not comment on the fact that Ronan had skipped ahead to ‘next time.’ She was busy dragging in grateful gasps of air. Waking up inside a panic attack was more common than not, these days, but like most of the attacks, the adrenaline-flooded dying feelings tapered after about five minutes. There were worse things.

Ronan did not comment on the fact that she was cowering from a bad dream under a blanket like a toddler. He didn’t seem inclined to discuss the nightmare at all, actually. “I’m ordering breakfast. What do you eat? No arsenic.”

“Ha ha,” Hennessy said.

“Seriously. It’s my ‘sorry you’re still alive’ treat. Lay it on me.”

“Saffron,” she said. “An entire plate of saffron.”

Ronan snorted. “You want to pair the saffron with, uh, literally anything that doesn’t come in a spice cabinet?”

“No. I want a half-pound of saffron piled on a paper plate so I can swallow it and render thousands of work hours and harvested flowers unsacred.”

“All right,” Ronan said, pulling out his phone. “I’m getting tacos for me.”

“I’ll take six.”

His mouth curved, so slightly that she wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t become used to his scowl. “What about to drink?”

“Jack Daniels.”

“All right,” he repeated, just as placid. She couldn’t tell whether he was actually following through or not. “Anything else while I’m at it?”

“Cocaine. Next year’s Porsche 911 model, never driven, turbo engine. A signed first edition of whichever book you hated most in high school English. Three hookers - one must be male, the other two can be any gender. A Jacuzzi. Illegal sand stolen from Hawaii. Bubble bath that performs microdermabrasion. A blepharoplasty. The outcomes of every sports game for the next twenty years. Ostrich eyelash paintbrushes.”

She could keep going in this vein for a while, except that it seemed doomed to veer into deep psychological territory, and she wasn’t about to hand over her internal mechanics like a waif on an old-timey psychiatrist’s couch.

When she’d been silent an entire ten seconds, Ronan said, “How about a shower?”

“Oh, God, I’ll trade everything for a shower.”

He snorted. “First door there,” he said, gesturing at the hallway behind him like an elaborate ringmaster introducing a new act. “You need a change of clothes?”

“I’ll wear these.”

“Sure.”

She’d been ready to fight him on this - _I’m not wearing your fucking clothes like you own me_ \- so the acquiescence left her off-balance, even though it was the same placid attitude he'd offered for everything so far.

When Ronan didn’t add anything else, she picked her backpack up and brought it with her to the bathroom. She felt better when she’d locked the door, carefully trying the knob to make sure the latch held.

She ran the shower, but that was so the sound would cover the unzipping of her backpack. When she dug through each pocket, including the sewn-in patches you could only find if you were looking, all her shit remained where she’d left it. This eased her breathing in ways she wasn’t ready to examine.

Then she made a study of the bathroom itself. It was a utilitarian space, for the most part, all white walls and gleaming tiled floors. She discovered the plastic packaging for some disposable shaving razors in the trash can, but the blades themselves were nowhere to be found. Either Ronan or the boyfriend had gotten rid of them. They hadn’t gotten rid of the mirror, though, which she could smash to sharp edges with a fist.

This opened a few different possibilities. One was that Ronan and the boyfriend were both idiots. Another was that they’d made a performance out of harm-proofing the bathroom as a show of passive aggression. Another was that Ronan trusted her but felt it reasonable to minimize temptation. Another was that Ronan had a key or a lockpick, and her privacy in here was all manufactured calculation, gifting a false sense of safety so she wouldn’t run.

She stopped that train of thought cold before her hands could start shaking. Rinsed the makeup off her face with soap and water since there were no makeup remover wipes to be found. Then she showered. The process was uneventful, aside from the mild surprise of finding both conditioner suited to her natural hair and body wash that smelled like citrus.

She spent longer in the shower than was necessary, partly because she wanted to see whether Ronan would barge in. If the privacy was an illusion, she’d rather find out now rather than later. But when the hot water ran lukewarm, she grudgingly redressed and exited the bathroom.

Ronan had dragged a coffee table closer to the couch and laid it with a dazzling spread of takeout. Hennessy dropped her backpack and boots beside the table and settled herself next to him, grabbing a paper plate and loading it with an indecent number of rolled tacos.

“Whose conditioner did I just use?” she asked.

Ronan stared at her blankly. “Not mine.”

Hennessy sneered at him. “I hadn’t guessed.”

“What’s the bottle look like?”

“Round, tan, flat? There’s words on the label, you know, in case you’d recognize those.”

“Round tan and flat is Sargent’s.” She leveled him with an unimpressed stare that said, _Namedropping doesn’t tell me shit when I don’t recognize the name._ “Another one of my soulmates.”

“Which?”

She meant which mark, since Ronan had at least two that weren’t hers. But Ronan just crammed half a taco in his mouth and asked, between bites, “Who’s wrapped around your neck?”

He was talking about the colored floral tattoo curled around her throat. She resisted the defensive urge to touch it.

“No one,” she said, which was both the truth and appropriately petulant. “Which mark is your boyfriend’s?”

Ronan’s thin mouth thinned further. She’d hit upon something, here, though she wasn’t sure what. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” he said.

That was a fair enough deal. Well, unfair to him, beneficial to her. She didn’t have anything to tell. “You first.”

“Fine.” 

He made no great show of pulling his tank top over his head and wadding it up between his hands. His whole torso was nicked with scars, silvery or reddish-purple, but there weren’t any shaded silhouettes to be seen. All of his tattoos were colored. Hennessy wasn’t sure whether there were darkened shapes under his jeans where she couldn’t see, or whether he’d met all of the important players in his life, or whether he’d faked his canvas like she’d faked hers.

He turned his back to her. “The wing is Sargent’s,” he said.

It was a splash on the opposite shoulder from her own mark. Hennessy touched it lightly. The purples and blues and greens blended together like a haphazard spill of paint. They were too pale to mimic with acrylics or oils on a canvas. If she painted him, she’d need true watercolors for this mark, lest any other medium render the image too solid.

“There’s raven feathers in the same spot on her shoulder,” Ronan added.

Hennessy had heard of people with matching soul marks before - images on the same part of the body, similar composition or coloring or detail. There’d been studies, she thought, to encode the phenomenon into applicable science. What different matching elements meant, how they could be used to predict the future of a relationship. She didn’t know whether anything had come of the research. The attempts to quantify millenniums of cross-cultural tradition and storytelling, to prove who was right or wrong, didn’t particularly interest her.

“So she’s… your girlfriend?”

Ronan snorted. “It could not be less romantic if we kicked each other off a cliff. I’m gay.”

Weirdly, this also stilled some of the anxious fluttering in Hennessy’s chest. It wasn’t that he was bad-looking; the brightness of day had washed away none of the dangerous appeal. Hennessy would have had no problem sleeping with him on her terms. But the fact that they were bonded -

It was just, Hennessy didn’t like it when things _didn’t_ happen on her terms.

It was just, she hadn’t really recognized how afraid she’d been that he’d put his hands on her until she stopped worrying about it.

“What about the trees?” she asked. She tried to keep the relief out of her voice, but she wasn’t sure how to measure success.

Ronan touched the side of his neck. The silver forest wrapped around his throat and bled onto the tops of his shoulders, a few delicate trunks and branches nearly overlapping the petals of her flower. “Gansey. Last name only, like you.”

“What’s your mark on them?”

She heard the grin more than saw it at this angle. “A dragon. Only thing making him look like a badass.”

Of course. She rolled her eyes. “And that’s… the boyfriend?”

“Not the one I live with.”

Different boyfriend, then. He collected partners like a fucking bouquet. “There was a mark on your front,” she said.

He turned so she could see his chest. This mark curled over his ribs like a trellis, similarly positioned to her own, except it had the relaxed greens and muddy browns of a pond bed. Up close, the shades blended and smeared incomprehensibly. When she leaned back, she could make out a cattail, a thatch of grass, a hint of darkly reflected sky. The image wasn't beautiful so much as calming.

“Noah,” Ronan said. The unguarded fondness on his face startled her; he could nearly pass for kind. “Troublemaking pain in my ass. Mine on him is some starry shit. Or just straight-up glitter, I can never tell.”

“So Noah’s…”

“Still not the boyfriend I live with.” Ronan unbunched his shirt and lifted his arms like he was going to pull it back on. “So that’s that. Your turn.”

“Hold on,” she said, “you’ve got one more.”

Ronan yanked the fabric over his torso with more force than was actually necessary, but Hennessy had already touched the red spatter near his hip.

“I’m not talking about that one,” he said.

He said it like principle, but Hennessy knew that he was really admitting to vulnerability. Being as open as Ronan was meant that omissions and avoidances were easier to spot. People couldn’t suss out her weaknesses so quickly, because she didn’t give anything away, whether it was important or not.

“If I’m talking about mine, you’re talking about yours,” she said. “That was the deal.”

Ronan’s lip curled. He didn’t reply, but he also didn’t shove her away, which she took for permission to study. She lifted the tank top. The mark disappeared under the waistband of his jeans, but what she could see looked like a crime scene. Like the aftermath of a stabbed artery, all the dark and bright reds, veins turned inside-out. It was vicious and lovely and satisfying in ways she couldn’t explain. Every soul mark, she thought, should look like the fatal injury it was.

She wasn’t about to start stripping him to get a better look, and her study was interrupted anyway when a key turned in the door. 

The guy who entered did not look particularly impressed, but he didn't look surprised either. Hennessy kept her hand where it was and faced him with the same challenging half-smirk she generally used when unwitting spouses arrived to find her homewrecking.

His face was - interesting, she decided, as he shrugged off his jacket and hung it beside the door. Guarded and shadowed, with features she’d like to capture in paint. He didn’t appear upset, but he also didn’t really appear present at all. Like a marionette twitching through the motions of day-to-day life.

“Parrish,” Ronan said. “There’s taquitos.”

Ronan’s body language was infinitely more interesting to Hennessy. He hadn’t straightened up or shoved her away or put distance between them the way a cheating bastard might. He hadn’t tried to hide how close they were sitting or how Hennessy was touching him. There was no reason for him to, of course - the lack of fear wasn’t the interesting part.

The interesting part was that he’d erased all of the tension in his shoulders and jaw, every ounce of wound-up conflict between them. He’d leaned against the back of the couch and hooked his hands behind his head in a performance of unconcern. Whatever vulnerability he was hiding, he didn’t want the boyfriend knowing about it.

“I already ate,” Boyfriend said. Hennessy didn’t think she was imagining the slight frostiness in his tone.

“I’ll stick the leftovers in the fridge, then.”

“Thanks.”

Boyfriend hung his keys beside his jacket, and then he started for the hallway. He had to pass the couch to do so, which made it patently obvious that he was ignoring Hennessy. Hennessy appreciated the fact that he wasn’t attempting to hide it.

“Don’t be a rude bastard,” Ronan said before Boyfriend successfully made his escape. “Hennessy, this is Adam. Or Parrish. Adam, this is Hennessy.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Adam said, deferential and Southern and reflexively polite. “I don’t mean to be rude. I’m just real tired.”

Hennessy said, “Is this your soul mark?”

She meant the crime scene splatter. Now, finally, Ronan gripped her wrist and pulled her hand away, letting the tank top fall to cover the evidence.

She was watching Adam’s face rather than Ronan’s - he was the more unknown party in this equation, after all. His facial muscles underwent a series of complicated ripples, like a reflection wavering and distorting in a lake. She couldn’t name every microexpression without a frame by frame playback, but she did know that none of them were pleasant.

“No,” Adam said. “He’s not my soulmate.”

Hennessy identified, lightning-fast, at least a dozen poisonous remarks she could make. There were a lot of easy ways to make Ronan let her go. Driving a wedge between him and his loved ones seemed simplest.

But she could cut the two of them down whenever she wanted. An opportunity to plumb the secrets was rarer, so it wasn’t one to squander.

“It should have been mine,” she said.

This she was certain of. Fuck pretty sunset-colored flower petals. Anyone doomed to her presence deserved a glaring warning sign.

Ronan’s sharp laugh startled her. It was the same laugh from when she'd said, _This is not going to be a love story._ His fingers tightened on her wrist, but she didn’t think that was intentional. She wasn’t sure he even knew he was still holding her.

“No,” he said, “it really shouldn’t have.”

Interesting.

Also interesting: the transformation in Adam from guarded politeness to open hostility. “She’s a real keeper, Lynch,” he said, and then he walked down the hallway and shut the bedroom door with a little too much force.

“Shit,” Ronan muttered, releasing her arm. “Fuck me. Whatever. He’s mad at me either way. Your turn. What kind of tragic shit do your marks say?”

Whatever issues existed here, he was clearly done discussing them. Hennessy considered making up a fake entity or two, like she did whenever anyone else asked. But then she shrugged one shoulder. “Mostly,” she said, “that I’m a liar.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ronan and hennessy go to war  
> adam and hennessy forge an alliance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> many many many messy things happen in this chapter. i'm not sure what to warn for specifically - it's a cocktail of trauma and conflict and psychological issues

Hennessy touched her floral tattoo. It was a stylistic impression, colors imprinted in technicolor blues and neon greens, nothing like the photorealistic petals on Ronan’s shoulder. Ronan tried to imagine a person behind the sharp lines and vivid contrasts, but he’d never been much for art theory or personality analysis.

“So what’s the lie?”

Her mouth curled. She had this way of snarling and smiling at the same time, an expression that could be either cruel satisfaction or vindictive bitterness. Ronan noticed and filed it away, because he’d now been in her company long enough to recognize common tics and habits.

“The idea that anyone’s laid a claim on me.” She ran her fingertips horizontally along the curve of her throat like she was tracing the path of a knife. “It’s inked. I had it done by a tattoo artist ages ago.”

Ronan tried to connect the dots and came up with a mess of incomprehensible scribbles. “Why bother? What’s the point?”

Maybe she had someone she’d been pretending to bond to. Ronan knew it was common for people without marks to fake one or two for any number of social reasons. He was familiar with how irritated Adam got when he stumbled upon inspirational stories on the internet. _This tattoo artist helps all the loveless freaks without fractured souls pretend their lives are worth living,_ he’d snarled on one memorable occasion, and then apologized twenty minutes later after he’d had his morning coffee.

The curve of Hennessy’s mouth widened. The expression still somehow managed to remain caught between ferocity and glee. “It was funny.”

Ronan gave her an expressionless stare. He didn’t buy it. Not with that look on her face.

“People want to be my soulmate,” she said. “A lot of people. That’s not bragging, it’s just a fact. They see one silhouetted mark, they get ideas. They start thinking they’re gonna be the one to save me or I’m gonna be the one to save them, soon as their skin brushes mine. People love putting their hands on me. Just to see. Just out of curiosity.”

There was obvious trauma here, an acrid tang Ronan didn’t need a psych degree to diagnose. So he wasn’t expecting her to follow up with, “So I fucked all of them, every single stupid fucking moron, and every time it didn’t mean a fucking thing, I added another flower. It’s my noose.”

Ronan treaded these waters cautiously. “You... wanted one of them to be your soulmate.”

Hennessy laughed. There was a manic edge to the sound that Ronan knew because he’d sampled the exact same flavors of “unhinged.” Again, she crested that edge, a fairy’s delight spilling the blood of mortals. A thrill that couldn’t possibly be described as happiness.

“No,” she said. “I wanted them all to die. So I strung them along and played the game and broke every single heart just to see what would happen. I don’t know if anyone jumped off a bridge, before you ask. I got bored waiting for the outcome. I hope they did. I won. These aren’t sappy little lovelorn heart-eyes sadnesses. These are my _war crimes.”_

Ronan didn’t point out that any soulmate worth their salt wouldn’t be a desperate worshiper anyway. He supposed she’d had to make a game of it. Otherwise she might have found herself paralyzed with worry that she’d find her fate in some random asshole on a subway platform by accident.

“Hell of a take on putting notches in your belt,” he said.

“I’m a fan of drama.”

Ronan could fucking tell.

“What about your arm?” he asked.

She raised her left hand. Wrapped around her forearm was a rainbow-colored ribbon, bright against her dark skin, shifting gradients like a whimsical accessory caught in a breeze. “Another fake. Mirror of my sister’s.”

He arched an eyebrow.

“We were running a con. We're identical.”

“You didn’t just get a temporary tat?”

“Why would I do that when I could fuck with people instead? _Two_ whole realized soulmates instead of one. I’m all parceled out. Used up. The romance is dead.”

“It’s colored in,” he pointed out. “Your sister’s met this one?”

Something flashed across her face. It wasn’t the relatable mania or bitterness of her usual nastiness. Instead, it was a malevolence unfamiliar to Ronan, a hate so pure that he nearly recoiled. It was an expression that reminded him that for all their similarities, she was not him, and he had no fucking idea what lurked under her skin.

But the hatred was only visible for a half-second, and then her features settled back into their usual half-amused cruelty. “Sure. She’s a slut.”

Ronan leveraged the Unimpressed Look.

“That’s a joke,” she added, “because I’m technically the slut. Anyway! Sharing time’s over. Thanks for playing!”

“You don’t have any others? Ones you’re not copping to? Ones that haven’t colored in yet?”

“Nope. You’re the lucky lottery winner, sweet cheeks. At least a dozen people would hurl themselves off a cliff to be where you are.”

A sick dread began winding its way from Ronan’s gut toward every rib in his sternum. “I’m seriously your only one?” he demanded.

“Oh, I know. You were hoping to drop me off on the doorstep of a loving husband so he could fix my meds.” She laughed again. “Poor baby. No quick-call solution. No strangers for your speed dial. It’s all just fucking me, Lynch. You’ve got no _idea_ what kind of nightmare you walked into.”

Ronan had a pretty good idea. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of the couch. “Give me a second.”

“No, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think we’re playing catchup.” Her fingers clamped like iron around his wrist. His eyes remained shut, but he could tell that she’d leaned forward because her breath was warm on his mouth. And the smell of her, Blue's body wash and conditioner, mixing up all the signals in his head.

“I don’t think we’re doing that,” she continued, soft, ruthless. “Because you’re the one who dragged me around telling me I have to live, like you were right not to mind your own business at the subway station. Are you upset you signed your name as my next-of-kin, baby? Is playing the hero not everything you thought it’d be? Babysitting your crazy bitch half is a _fulltime job.”_

Ronan lashed out. If he’d been asked to explain, he’d have said that he was trying to pull his arm away. But in truth, he shoved her back hard enough that she pitched off the couch, smacked her back on the edge of the coffee table, and crumpled in a graceless heap on the floor.

He froze. Words like _domestic violence_ and _abusive partner_ and _you’re not a fucking kid anymore, you know better_ flashed across his mind, blaring warning lights. He tried to shape _are you okay?_ but his tongue stuck to his sandpaper mouth.

Hennessy stretched out like an accordion unfolding and laid on her back. She was laughing.

“Is that what happens when people don’t ‘give you a second,’ Lynch? No wonder Adam acts like the ghost of a Southern gentleman. How often do you win the argument with a fist in his face?”

Ronan thought about killing her.

It wasn’t a thought he’d ever act on, obviously. There was a difference between fleeting rage and actual premeditation. Ronan was not the kind of man who left bodies in his wake, and killing her would just prove her point anyway, and he wasn’t about to give her another reason for vindication.

But he thought about it.

Then he pressed all the fury into a tiny ball beneath his ribs and spoke.

“I would have brought you here whether we were soulmates or not,” he said. His voice came out measured despite the red mist crowding his vision. “I would have dragged you into that diner and gotten you help and given you a place to sleep even if you didn’t speak my fucking _language._ Because that’s what decent fucking human beings do. It’s not my fault you’ve decided that everything I do is an act of war. I didn’t paint your fucking ribs. That’s not on me. I don’t give a _shit_ whether we’re fated. I helped you because I didn’t want you to fucking _die.”_

She’d stopped laughing. Instead, she’d propped herself up on her elbows and was eyeing him sharply, the ghost of her amusement still etched around her mouth.

“You want to be alone so fucking bad? Fine. It’s not my goddamn problem. Congratulations, now you’ve got three meaningless marks to lie about.”

“Good.” She sat up and grabbed her backpack. “I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

“Sorry it took me so fucking long to get here.” He bared his teeth. “I never gave a shit about the mark in the first place. But yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s make it a proper parting. God forbid I give a single fucking shit.”

She smiled. This smile he recognized not from himself, but from Adam, the humorless grin he wore when he’d been vindicated about something hurtful. “Don’t put that on me, Lynch. That was _your_ mistake. Anyone with sense knows not to give a single fucking shit.”

She scanned the room, presumably to make sure none of her shit was amiss, and then she swung her backpack over her shoulder and laced up her boots and strolled out of the apartment. The door slammed with a thundercrack.

Ronan held still for sixty counted seconds. Then he stood up and began placing the taquitos back in the takeout container so they could be stored in the fridge.

By the time he’d consolidated the mess into two bags, Adam had crept soundlessly out of the bedroom to peer around the entrance to the hallway. “Oh,” he said, and emerged into the living room. “I heard the door slam. Thought you left.”

Thought Ronan left and that Hennessy was still in the living room.

“No,” Ronan said.

Adam hesitated. “I heard fighting. Well. Raised voices. Hyena laughter.”

“And?”

“It wasn’t a Blue type of fight, huh?”

He meant that it wasn’t a heated spat that they’d smooth over with pizza and cuddles on the couch.

“No,” Ronan said. “It wasn’t a Blue type of fight.”

“Where’s she headed?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“When’s she getting back?”

“She’s not.”

Ronan _felt_ Adam assessing the situation, trying to gauge his state of mind, his vulnerabilities, whether his self was fracturing. He felt the analytical gaze sweep over him like a psychic brush. Ronan could make things easier, he knew, by explaining the situation, except that the words would never come out the way he needed them to, and Adam would quietly resent him for not trying regardless, and all of a sudden, he was done.

He was done. He was fucking done. He wanted to overturn the coffee table. He wanted to put his fist through the balcony door.

Adam sat beside him, gingerly, in the spot Hennessy had just vacated. “I didn’t hear any of what was said. I can’t, through the walls, it’s too muffled.” He touched his deaf ear. “In case you were worried. My superpower. Minding my own business.”

Ronan stood up. He grabbed the takeout bags and brought them into the apartment’s tiny kitchen, which let him escape Adam's sight line. He placed the bags in the fridge. He considered returning to the couch and laying his head in Adam’s lap. He considered removing all the glasses and hurling them at the floor. He leaned his forehead against one of the upper cupboards.

One deep breath later, he straightened and returned to the living room. “You were right,” he said, voice bright enough to cross from ‘casual’ to ‘deranged.’ “It was a bad idea. She'll go off and _fucking die._ Like I even _fucking care.”_

Adam assessed him again, slow and careful. Ronan thought about broken glass.

“Okay,” Adam said. “I’m gonna go out for a little bit.”

Ronan’s heart stuttered _no_ and _I’m sorry_ and _don’t leave me alone right now._ His head, which was the only part that mattered with Adam, pointed out that it was very reasonable for Adam to get out of the line of fire, and also that Ronan had no reason to be upset, given that the ousting was mutually decided.

“All right,” Ronan said.

Adam stood. “Be here when I get back.”

“All right.”

“Ronan.”

“I’m just going to sit on the fucking couch. I’m not having a crisis.” As Adam moved around the coffee table, he jerked back and spat, _“Don’t touch me.”_

Which was pretty much a neon blinking sign labeled I AM HAVING A CRISIS.

Adam pinched the bridge of his nose. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Text me if you need me. You want me to get you anything while I’m out?”

“No.”

They’d reached the end of the Concern Script. This was as far as Adam could flounder, and Ronan didn’t want him to keep trying, so he breathed a sigh of relief as Adam shrugged on his jacket and exited much more quietly than Hennessy.

Ronan sat on the couch and stared into space. He decided he was going to organize a mental strike against having thoughts. This was an excellent way to occupy his time for about four minutes, which was how long it took for the brain picketers to insistently add a bottle of Jack Daniels to their demands. He hadn't completed Hennessy's ridiculous online order, but he could. He had the page bookmarked. 

He pulled out his phone and dragged a couch blanket over his shoulders.

He ignored the web browser and opened his contacts.

“Gansey,” he said as the other line picked up, an _it’s not emergency services_ reassurance, “I need you.”

-

Hennessy's departure was full of variables. Adam worried that she’d have found a rideshare or disappeared down one of the million side streets, but when he stepped outside the apartment, he discovered her sitting on a bench a block away.

Given what Ronan had told him, he was reasonably certain that calling her name would make her bolt. Instead, he walked very calmly and quietly up to the bench and sat on the unoccupied left side. Avoiding detection wasn’t hard. He was good at not being noticed.

It was a second before she even recognized him, and then it was with disinterest. “Oh. You.”

“Me,” he agreed.

“If you’re looking for a domestic violence hotline, you’re better off with bus station ads. I’m all tapped out of charity.”

Adam paused, tried to fit this non sequitur into his mental understanding of the situation, and then decided he didn’t want to know.

“You can’t leave,” he said.

“Fine. Drag me back inside. Kidnapping’s a felony.” 

She’d barely glanced at him, opting to focus on her phone screen. Adam saw a long string of unanswered texts before she hit the power button.

“What did you do to him?”

Hennessy’s lips pressed together. Adam would have liked to read the expression as ‘bothered,’ but his ability to interpret other people’s feelings was half-baked on a good day, and he didn’t trust a single twitch of this woman’s fingertips.

“Truth’s a bitch,” she said. “It's cute that you want me to keep squatting, but adding a third doesn’t solve existing relationship problems. Did I read that in a magazine or learn it from being the third? You decide.”

“My relationship’s fine, actually. You’re leaving for good. All right. I can work with that. Just tell me exactly which Ronan I’m dealing with.”

“I’m not an expert in different types of Ronans. On account of not knowing him.” She pulled a tube of lip gloss out of the outer pocket of her backpack and began applying it with no mirror.

“What did you do to him?”

“Why are you assuming _I_ did something to _him?”_

Adam just looked at her.

She smiled with all her teeth. “Caught me. I did.”

Adam continued looking at her for a long moment. He knew Ronan well enough to align puzzle pieces. She'd fucked him up by tapdancing across any number of trauma triggers, knowingly or not. That wasn't a surprise. Adam had only needed to be in her presence for thirty seconds to see a long-buried ghost.

Giving her more ammunition would be insane. To plead Ronan’s case, explain that Ronan was one of the rare genuinely good humans on the planet, offer tragic backstory and bullshit camaraderie - no. Adam could have attempted that tactic if he'd thought it would work, even if emotional horseshit wasn't his forte. But with how Hennessy operated, it would be like handing an unregistered gun, bullets, and Ronan's name to an assassin.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I wish you had died.”

Her hand paused mid-gloss-application.

Adam continued, calm and measured. “That’s the ideal timeline, right? He didn’t notice you, or he slept through work and wasn’t on the platform, or he didn’t quite catch your arm. You died. He never met you. If he saw it happen, he’s messed up for a couple weeks, but in the end you’re just a sad headline. A month from now, nobody remembers. Nobody cares.”

“Look, mate,” she said, “if you’re trying to make me sad, you’ve got the wrong angle. That is in fact the most baller timeline.”

“I’m not trying to make you feel anything. I don’t really care what you feel. I don’t care about you at all. I’m explaining something to you from a logical perspective.”

Hennessy screwed the cap back on the lip gloss. “Explain away, then.”

Adam offered his thesis. “It would have been better if you died. Ronan’s an idiot for thinking otherwise. We both know it. If you dying _now_ would still be better, I wouldn’t be out here. I’d be inside hoping you choke to death on a hot dog.”

She snorted. “Oh, I think it can still be better. I promise your boy toy’s gotten over my ‘intrinsic worth' or whatever the hell he's on about.”

“No,” Adam said, “he hasn’t.”

“Trust me. He has.”

“Trust _me_. He hasn’t.”

“He tell you that? Is he curled up weeping on the carpet because of the one who got away?”

Adam studied her. There wasn’t any anger in him, or exhaustion, or hurt. There wasn’t even exasperation. Whatever fueled his ire had burned out, leaving behind only placid pragmatism.

“Here’s what I need to know,” he said. “Did you do it because it’s fun, or because you wanted him to stop caring?”

“I’m bored with this conversation.”

“Because,” Adam continued, “if it was fun, that’s fine. You clearly don’t want to keep messing with him. You can leave and I’ll find a way to weather the fallout. I’m not gonna delude myself into thinking I can convince you not to be a piece of shit.”

“Smart boy.”

“But if you were trying to get him to stop caring by - being the worst person possible, or _whatever_ \- you’re losing a rigged game. He doesn’t stop caring. Ever.”

Hennessy finally looked at Adam, brow furrowed. He met her gaze without flinching. 

“You’re suffering from a lack of imagination,” she said dismissively. “Everyone stops caring if you push them hard enough.”

“Ronan doesn’t. It’s one of his most annoying traits.”

She was quiet for long enough that Adam would have been satisfied with the silence alone. At least she appeared to be thinking it over, or maybe just caught in a mental argument.

“I can’t,” she started, and her voice cracked, “be near him. With how I am. If he’s not horrible. I can't be near him.”

“That’s fine,” Adam said. It wasn’t consoling or sympathetic, just a statement of fact. It was fine. It was more honesty than he’d expected, actually. “Give me your number.”

“Why?”

“So I know you’re alive. I won’t be obnoxious. I’m not social.” He dug through his pockets and pulled out his phone. “Here.”

She swiped the back of a hand against her eyes and took the phone. He supposed she could input a fake number - he wasn’t going to act like a controlling asshole by checking - but she hadn't refused outright, at least.

“You’re kind of sweet for a guy who wants me dead,” she said.

“I’m not. I don’t give a shit about you.” Adam relayed this, too, with the calm air of someone reading a stock market report. It wasn’t a weapon, just a fact. “I give a shit about Ronan.”

“That’s why you’re sweet.” She handed his phone back. “Caring about him because he’s good. There are worse games to play.”

He glanced at the contact - HENNESSY with no extra punctuation or emojis - and tucked the device back into his pocket.

“Trust me,” he said, “I know.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> adam and ronan finally work their shit out after managing to hurt each other with stress-induced nastiness

Adam returned to find Ronan on the phone with Gansey, which was a relief. It boded well that Ronan had both remembered that calling Gansey helped, and that Ronan hadn’t retreated into such a turtle shell of self-loathing that he’d decided to ignore this fact.

He heard the tail end of the call - _nah, man, I’m fine now, I was being dramatic - well, fine, if it’s_ nonrefundable, _I know you can’t fucking spare those funds-_

So Gansey would be here tomorrow because he’d booked a last-minute train ticket, which Ronan didn’t seem too displeased about, and which saturated Adam with more relief. Gansey currently cohabitated with Blue and Henry outside a college campus a six hour drive away while the non-Gansey entities finished school. They were close enough to Adam and Ronan to keep accessories in the bathroom, but far enough for most visits to require advance planning.

Noah tended to bounce around, but for the moment was entrenched in a cross-country adventure he’d lovingly nicknamed Map to the World’s Shittiest Tourist Destinations. Adam would have preferred for Noah to be home, if only because Noah was better at soothing Ronan than any of them. Including Gansey. And, if he was being selfish, Adam wanted to lay down with his head on Noah’s chest and forget the world for a few minutes.

Ronan suffered, separated from the rest of his soulmates. He hadn’t been apart from them this constantly since the year after high school. It was a suffering he weathered without verbal complaint, even though he had every reason to complain. Adam, for his part, missed the others with a fierceness that ached. He suspected the sensation was similar to Ronan’s, since he'd grown the same sort of roots around all of them even if the universe hadn't told him to.

Gansey was coming. Thank God. Thank God.

The phone call appeared to have restored temporary equilibrium. Adam double-checked that he’d done everything necessary for the weekend, made sure Ronan wasn’t exhibiting signs of Doing Something Stupid, laid down for a nap, and woke in the early evening. Half his hair spiked like an enthusiastic plant, the other half clinging to his head. He shuffled out with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders to find Ronan sitting on the balcony.

This could have been peaceful, but it wasn’t. To be fair, it wasn’t violent either. Ronan had settled on the concrete ground and pressed his back against the railing, staring into the apartment rather than out at the view. Adam didn’t think he was seeing anything, though. His eyes were unfocused. Bleary.

He had his knees folded tight against his chest, compacting his frame into the smallest possible space. His elbows rested on them, hands idly curled in the air, wristbands making stark black rings against his skin.

Adam sighed softly and slid the door open. “Chair’s more comfortable.”

Ronan didn’t even look at him. “Mm.”

It was better, when Ronan’s pain was quiet, to be quiet with him. Adam didn’t need to know what was going through Ronan’s mind, really. He’d become familiar with this haggard expression. The distance was because Ronan’s mind housed a playground of emotional landscaping to fuck around in, and he’d lost interest in staying outside himself.

There was no reason to sit on the ground when there were perfectly good chairs on the balcony, but Adam settled beside Ronan in solidarity. He leaned his head back against the railing.

They both existed in this quiet for a long time, allowing the dusk to thread across the evening until it had covered the world in an inky blanket of night. Adam could see a single strip of the sky if he tilted his head back.

He was half-dozing when Ronan said, “I’m her only one.”

Adam understood immediately. “Her other marks are fakes?”

“Yup.”

Ah. There were plenty of reasons that made things worse. A lot worse. Adam reached to twine his fingers with Ronan’s, squeezing his hand.

“Think she’s dead yet?” Ronan asked. “You can’t actually tell. It’s bullshit what people say about being able to tell. You don’t feel shit until you get the call.”

“No,” Adam said. “She’s okay.”

Ronan glanced sharply at him. This kind of conviction, coming from Adam, wasn’t a pleasant reassurance. Adam didn’t relay opinions as facts unless he’d deemed his evidence strong enough.

Adam pulled out his phone and showed Ronan his texts, Hennessy’s reply timestamped thirty minutes ago.

_Still alive?_

_thought you said you wouldn’t be obnoxious_

“You went after her.” Ronan closed his eyes and let his head thunk back against the railing.

“Of course I did.”

“Of course you did.”

“Look,” Adam said, “knowing she’s safe is better than not knowing. I wasn’t gonna watch you string yourself out over whether she’s okay without having some way to check.”

“It doesn’t fucking matter. ‘Sbetter. To break it off now. I only knew her for like two days, what’s it gonna fucking matter if she dies? I don’t care. If God wanted someone to save her, He should’ve given her someone who isn’t me.”

On a technical level, Adam believed all of these statements to be true. He was well aware that human connections grew stronger with time, soulmate mark or no mark. He knew that Ronan wasn’t built to be a lone savior. More importantly, he knew that Ronan didn’t deserve to be forced into that role.

But Ronan was choking on acid and bitterness. This wasn’t Ronan dusting off logistics and ethics and philosophical questions. It wasn’t a carefully calculated decision. One thing that Adam had learned over the years was that Ronan sometimes needed to be angry to avoid collapsing. Fury, hatred, rage, blackhearted spite: all these provided a reason to get out of bed. Once the anger wore off, Adam didn’t know how Ronan would face the emptiness underneath.

So he was glad that he’d gone after Hennessy.

They almost managed not to fight about it.

Almost.

The evening passed quietly. Adam reheated the leftover taquitos in the microwave and split them with Ronan. He turned in early, since he’d have to go back to work the following morning. Sleeping was a luxury that Adam preferred to enjoy whenever possible; the soft cocoon of the sheets reminded him of his situation’s stability.

He woke to a clatter and the sound of quiet swearing. 

Ronan had leaned over him and grabbed Adam’s phone where it laid on the nightstand. In the process, he’d also yanked the charger out of the wall and sent a scatter of smooth gray stones onto the floor. The stones had been a gift from Blue; Adam blearily reached down and began gathering them up before the scene registered.

He flicked the lamp on and rolled over. “What are you doing?”

“Relax, I’m not snooping through your texts.”

“Great. I wasn’t asking for process of elimination.”

“Tanking your score in, uh - Jesus, you really don’t have any mobile games on here. What is the _point.”_

“Give me my phone.”

“One sec.”

Adam sat up. Despite Ronan’s insistence that he wasn’t snooping, he _was_ definitely thumbing through Adam’s contacts. For half a second, Adam was just annoyed - Ronan could wait to text any of the people listed. Then he remembered.

He snatched the phone back.

Ronan let go easily. “It’s cool, I got it,” he said, opening up the contacts list of his own phone to type in Hennessy’s number. Once upon a time, Adam might have hoped that Ronan couldn’t remember the ten-digit string, but Ronan’s memory tended to be precise when it came to things he considered “not fucking useless.”

“Change of heart?”

“Something like that.”

“She doesn’t want to hear from you, Ronan.”

“I’m not gonna bug her. I’m just gonna let her know how to get in touch if she - I’m not gonna fucking push it. She’ll probably block me. Which is fine.”

Adam gathered up the rest of the fallen stones, plugged the charger back in, set his phone down on the table, and switched off the lamp. The process made him feel a little less scattered, though tiredness manifested as irritated itching behind his eyes.

“You don’t have to do that,” Adam said. “I can tell you if she needs you.”

He knew, even before he said it, that he would never do so. Ronan must have known it too, because he let out a derisive snort.

“She’s not your responsibility, Ronan.”

Ronan turned away from Adam, closing himself off, the colors of the marks on his back glimmering in the pale window-streamed moonlight. “That’s why you don’t have any soulmates, Parrish. You’re never gonna understand how this fucking feels.”

Adam stopped breathing.

“Don’t look like that.” Ronan's voice was a growl.

“You aren’t even looking at me.”

“I can tell. Like a kicked fucking puppy. I didn’t mean it like that and you know it.”

“Right,” Adam said. He hadn’t yet recovered from the surprise of the blow. 

There was a corner of his mind that knew this wasn’t about him - it was about Ronan’s pain and loneliness and guilt and desire to be seen. But most of him was already tired of it. Tired of the sleepless nights, tired of Ronan’s insistence that the soulmate connection meant nothing, tired of Ronan’s belief that the soulmate connection meant everything. Tired of Hennessy monopolizing Ronan’s time and heart when no one involved wanted that.

Ronan yanked the blankets up to his chin, hiding his body from sight. “Just go back to fucking sleep.”

“All right.” Adam stared at the ceiling. He managed to go a full minute before the poison strangled him. He needed to get it out, so he said, “I’m sorry you’ve got a socially-induced savior complex, but that’s no excuse for being stupid.”

Ronan didn’t respond. Probably that was good. It never ended well when they fought over things Adam wasn’t sorry for saying.

-

Gansey couldn’t fucking get here fast enough.

After Adam left for work, Ronan spent most of the morning pacing like a caged animal. He could have ridden the subway out to his car so he could pick Gansey up from the train station, except the subway platform felt fraught. He could have called a rideshare to drive him to the lot, but the idea of being _talked at_ by people was unbearable.

He’d texted Hennessy. No response, as expected. Whatever. It wasn’t like he cared about his phone. He’d done the deed. He’d gone through the motions. He’d reached out. Nothing that happened now would be his fault. It was on her for not taking the offered help, not on him for leaving her alone.

This was what Adam couldn’t understand. Ronan knew that the idea of soulmates as saviors was antiquated, and that if bonds _were_ based in salvation, then Hennessy’s only existed because he’d pulled her back from the edge. He knew that he was no more obligated toward her than any other stranger. He knew that if a stranger had made it this clear that they wanted nothing to do with him, he’d have walked away without any of the sleepless nights.

He knew all that. In his head, he knew all that.

His heart didn’t care.

It had been a while since a bout of sadness had left him feeling this physically awful. The problem was not depression. Depression was easy enough to weather - it demanded days spent in bed, skipped meals, a sensation like a flu that wouldn’t go away and wasn't kind enough to kill you. 

But sometimes the switch flipped the opposite direction, sending frenetic energy buzzing underneath Ronan’s skin. The clinical term was mania. Ronan was aware of the clinical term. Ronan did not believe the clinical term did the experience justice. A positive manic episode could feel like a pedal-to-the-floor exhilarating race down a midnight blacktop. Or like the little-kid delight of waking up to the tiniest dusting of fresh snow on a Christmas morning in Virginia. A manic episode triggered by something like this -

It felt like having a body assembled wrong. Every limb just slightly off center, every twist of the spine making a bigger mess. It felt like burning, itching, incorrect immune response. It felt like a scream trapped inside your lungs that swelled and clawed and begged until the airways burst. It felt like an ocean’s dam of pressure crushing everything against a jammed release valve.

Pacing the living room offered no relief, and looking at the cupboards or the balcony door meant too much glass-shattering temptation, so Ronan eventually found himself folded on his knees in the middle of the floor. He lowered his head until it touched the carpet and clasped his hands around the back of his neck. His heartbeat competed with the ringing in his ears for dominance.

The position calmed him slightly. He laced his fingers tighter, applying pressure to the base of his skull. There were feel-good therapy mantras people were supposed to use, platitudes that made Ronan borderline homicidal. _Listen to your soul. Become aware of the universe. Exhale stress. Inhale peace._

These did not tend to work for Ronan, on account of him judging them frou-frou hippie-dippie bullshit designed to sell motivational posters.

He always forgot how fucking loud his mind could get.

_Okay,_ he told himself, sternly. It was less the you-can-do-it voice of a motivational coach and more the irritated exasperation of a dog owner finding piss on the carpet. _Get it the fuck together._

Possibly he could stay here for the entire day. Let Gansey decide he was even less stable than usual. Possibly he never needed to move again.

_Okay,_ he tried, seeking an updated-for-Ronans mantra that rang true. There were plenty of negative options. But he ended up circling back to the one fact he could always count on.

_I am Fucking Crazy._

Capital F, capital C. What was wrong in his head couldn’t be properly quantified on a gridded diagnostic chart.

He immediately felt better. It was laughable, actually, how much better he felt. It was the exact damn quietness following a successful howling exorcism in a horror flick. Fucking Crazy. Speak the name, acknowledge the demon, kick its ass.

Ronan uncurled and rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling. “I am not coping,” he told the tiles.

The tiles accepted his confession without judgment.

-

Ronan texted Gansey to make sure he had his apartment key so he could let himself in if Ronan wasn’t home upon his arrival. Then he put on his headphones and jogged to Adam’s workplace. This was a forty-minute endeavor completed in jeans and a tank, and Ronan felt it was a noble way to expend some of the ongoing restless energy.

Adam worked doing research assistance in a clinical lab operated by a nearby hospital. The building itself had the gray and forbidding exterior of a very angry government vehicle, which meant Ronan had a hard time reconciling the cheerful dispositions of most of the staff. “Real Stepford shit going on,” he’d told Adam once, conspiratorially, to which Adam had replied, “Oh, yeah, everyone in science is a serial killer. You don't know how hard I'm working to keep you off our hit lists."

Ronan didn’t have an established routine of dropping by. But since he tended to work nights when he worked at all, and since he was fond of bringing Adam horrifically unhealthy lunches from fast food drive-thrus, the friendly lady behind the reception desk greeted him by name. Ronan raised a hand in greeting and threw himself into one of the hard-backed plastic chairs.

_chillin in reception whenever ur on lunch_

_Gansey with you?_

_nah_

_I brought a lunch_

_good i dont have food_

The avoidant tone in Adam’s texts made it pretty clear that he was still upset about last night. Ronan didn’t know how to make it right if he couldn’t see Adam in person, though. He dreaded the thought that Desk Lady Marsha might wave him over and tell him Adam was too swamped to leave the lab, her eyes all full of pity and sincerity.

Ronan put his headphones on, closed his eyes, and tapped his fingers frenetically against the arm of the chair like he was self-soothing through a turbulent airplane ride. When a warm hand covered his, his shoulders relaxed. Even without opening his eyes or turning off the music, he recognized the callouses and pressure and little dry patches of skin.

Adam tugged the headphones off, his other hand setting them around Ronan’s neck and then cupping his cheek. “Hey. You okay?”

Ronan wrapped both arms around Adam and tugged him down against the chair.

This was not particularly romantic, on account of the chair being fucking tiny. It was more like Adam getting trapped at the most awkward, uncomfortable 45-degree angle of all time. “Yes, hello,” Adam said, “my _spine.”_

Ronan relented, which was to say that he stood up and walked outside. As soon as they’d stepped onto the sunny sidewalk and away from the building entrance, Ronan hugged him hard. Adam stiffened, surprised or bewildered or unreceptive for a second, and then he hugged Ronan back with equal fierceness.

“I shouldn’t have fought with you about it,” Adam said, resting his chin on Ronan’s shoulder. “About contacting her. I was a shithead, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t try to control what you do.”

“I keep fucking up.” Ronan pressed his lips to the shell of Adam’s hearing ear. “I keep fucking up and I don’t fucking like it, Parrish. We haven't fought this much since we were kids. Scares the piss out of me.”

_“Scares_ you? Why?”

Adam pulled back to meet Ronan’s eyes, his brow knit in a quizzical line. Then his face melted into rueful understanding.

“We’re not falling apart,” Adam said, sliding his hand up Ronan’s spine to press against the back of his neck. “Look at me, Ronan.”

“I _know_ we’re not,” Ronan snapped, sounding far more annoyed than he felt. “I’m just saying a lot of shit is up in the air right now.”

“Our relationship is not. Don’t be stupid.”

“I can’t actually opt out of feeling things just because I know they’re stupid. Missed that lesson in second grade, it’s not one of my superpowers, what-fucking-ever.”

Considering he’d come here to make amends, Ronan was amazed by how easy it was to start an argument instead. It wasn’t about this. It was about the half-fight they’d had last night, about Ronan falling asleep sick with guilt and misery and loneliness even though Adam was still beside him.

Adam’s mouth did something complicated and unhappy. His eyes, though, were all apology. “I know. I don’t want you to.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“I mean, would it be convenient? Sure. But things are what they are.”

“I won’t talk about her anymore.”

Now Adam looked startled. “What?”

Ronan was a little startled himself - he hadn’t known exactly what he was about to say until he said it. But the sentence was a solution to the problem, probably the only foolproof solution to the problem. “I won’t talk about her. You just let me know if you think she’s hurt. If you don't, I'll assume she's fine. She doesn’t have to be anything other than that. I'll shut the hell up.”

Adam began stroking Ronan’s neck, careful, soft, like he was trying to settle a spooked horse. “That feels like a pretty big thing not to talk about.”

_Add it to the list._ In his mind’s eye, Ronan snarled the sentiment with perfect acidity. In his actual body, he couldn’t get a single word out.

“Hey,” Adam said, just as soft as his hands, trying to get Ronan to meet his eyes, “hey, hey. I’ll stop being a dick. I’m sorry. I got upset and took it out on you, I wasn’t fair.”

This seemed like an incredibly sideways turn of events to Ronan. It was, technically, the resolution he’d come here for. An affirmation of their commitment, a reassurance that Ronan wasn't going to lose everything just because he'd lost Hennessy. Except that Ronan was supposed to be the one fixing things, and Adam was supposed to accept some kind of return to status quo, and the awful hollowness in Ronan’s chest was supposed to ease.

Ronan didn’t have words, and even if he did, he didn’t have speech to convey them. His throat had closed off. How could he ever explain what was happening inside him? Too many buzzing worries clamored for his attention. Some were related directly to Hennessy, but others were a pitch-black dust cloud kicked up by her sudden presence.

Ronan became aware that they were now sitting on a bench in the little park beside the lab. He had no memory of the walk over or how long it had taken. But a light breeze ruffled the grass, and Adam draped an arm around Ronan’s shoulders, and Adam’s mouth pressed kisses over Ronan’s temple and ear and jaw and neck. Adam’s lips, forming a rarely-verbalized mantra of _I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you._ Better-feeling sentiment than the yoga mom slogans.

Ronan hadn’t thought he’d be a mess here. If he'd known, he wouldn’t have come. He’d really believed that the worst of the feeling had been shaken out during his mini-exorcism, as though it wasn’t going to keep hitting him over and over. An inescapable drowning.

When Adam's form of therapy had successfully helped his breathing resume a normal rhythm, Ronan said, “Is your break over? I zoned out.” _Zoned out_ was less worrying than _lost time,_ even though Adam probably knew.

“Not quite. I’m gonna take off early, anyway.”

“Don’t. Gansey’ll be home when I get back. Fuck. Making you skip work is the literal opposite of what I want.”

Adam laced their fingers together. “Let me call you a ride back, then.”

“I can-”

“I know,” Adam said swiftly. “I know you can walk. It’ll just make me feel better. I’ll ask the driver not to talk.”

Ronan closed his eyes. “Fine.”

The shift in the direction of Adam’s voice meant he was focusing on his phone screen to order the car. “I don’t want you to hide things from me. I don’t want to be someone you have to hide things from.”

There was no way Ronan could ever respond to this specific sentiment. Instead he said, “I wasn’t making a dig at you.”

“You're gonna need to be specific.”

“What I said last night. You not feeling this. You not having soulmates. It wasn’t a dig at you. It sounded like one because I was annoyed and then I couldn’t take it back. It wasn’t.”

Adam’s fingers squeezed Ronan’s. Ronan was familiar enough with the pressure that he could tell this was a reassurance for Adam’s own benefit rather than an intentional comfort.

“I know there are some things I’m never gonna understand,” Adam said. “That’s okay. I’m not sore about it. You just startled me. On account of how unbelievably dickish you were being.”

Ronan’s laugh was a dry rasp, dangerously close to breaking. “You aren’t missing anything. I wouldn’t wish this on you in a million fucking years. God.”

And there was the thing that he’d actually come here to say, flitting back into his consciousness. “You don’t know how much time I’ve spent thanking fucking God for you," he said, fast, unspooled, "everything about you, I get to choose and my choices get to be _good_ because you’re so fucking worth it. And I’m so fucking glad you’ve always gotten a choice. Always. Your whole fucking life, how grateful I am - God. If anyone deserves to be spared this horseshit, it’s you.”

Surprise lit Adam’s face, a quiet and startled happiness in the curve of his mouth. “Maybe we should be mean to each other more often. Makes you a poet.”

“Absolutely fucking not. I did my time in the trenches.” A car that looked suspiciously like the rideshare pulled up to the curb, so Ronan got to his feet. “I’m gonna love the shit out of you and you’re just gonna have to deal.”

Adam bit down on the inside of his cheek, but not fast enough to hide his full-blown grin. “All right.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> originally this chapter was gonna bring some new faces in but adam and ronan needed to work their shit out so bad. mayhaps next time......


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> adam and hennessy accidentally enjoy each other's company

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter is actually mostly humor! incredible  
> it does depict some drug use and suicidal thoughts and unhealthy coping mechanisms on account of hennessy being her own content warning, etc

Hennessy couldn’t decide what to do. Both with the whole continued existence situation and her current boredom-induced dilemma.

The facts were these: Everything had changed since she’d decided to jump, and simultaneously nothing had changed.

Her life, body, mind - these damaged components remained the same. Her misery had not been mystically alleviated by the discovery of her other half, as her mother might have hoped. Ronan had not been the answer, not that she'd wanted him to be. She was sick of looking for answers. There was no reason to keep going. There was nothing she was holding on for.

The decision to jump had, originally, brought an overwhelming sense of relief. _That’s the solution, then,_ she’d thought, aware that no one with sane species-survival-prioritizing thought processes found this a viable solution, and also aware that her own thought processes were shredded far beyond hope of repair.

 _I’ll do it,_ she resolved after leaving Ronan Lynch’s apartment, except that the relief didn’t come. Instead, her mind crawled with itchy, irritable dissatisfaction. Anticlimax. There was more story to tell, or more world to destroy, and she’d be leaving her shitty side quests unfinished. Hennessy's personal circumstances had not broadened. But she'd been shown a glimpse of something just interesting enough for prolonged curiosity.

It wasn’t fear, really, or an overwhelming realization that life was worth living. It wasn't some Hallmark channel no-budget sad-father-of-four-having-epiphanies-by-a-lake moment. It was just apathy. Dying had always been a boring option, but she’d made peace with boring. She'd go out a cliche, statistic, anonymous point on graph, and her existence would be forgotten. No more than she deserved. 

In the PRL (Post Ronan Lynch) Era, she didn’t feel like settling anymore. There was something intolerable about the idea that she'd live down to the expectations of these people who smelled the worthlessness on her. She couldn't abide it.

Maybe out of spite. Maybe out of strength. Maybe out of something else. She didn’t know.

Which left Hennessy in the unfortunate position of being right back where she’d fucking started. Nothing had changed. Her mind had remembered the power of stubbornness, but nothing had changed.

There was a long list of people she couldn’t inflict herself upon, and a slightly shorter list of people who wouldn’t allow her to inflict herself upon them. This was what it had always been: Hennessy, warrior queen and take-no-shit badass. Hennessy, lounging across a cold and lonely throne because she’d never make room for anyone else. Hennessy, conquering bitch massacring hopes and dreams of innocents on the proverbial battlefield.

She didn’t sleep after she left Ronan’s. She returned to the yawning expanse of mansion that she’d half-fashioned into a home, inasmuch as a constant low-level party thrum could be homey. She’d found an in-law suite or servant’s quarters or something that was separated from the main house and still intact. It had had a lock when she moved in, and the entrance was difficult to find unless you knew where to look. There were now six locks. This was where she lived, for a certain definition of “living,” as more enthusiastic life continued out in the opulent expanse of ballroom and dining room and kitchen and overgrown garden.

There was always music playing. Always a sexy track with heavy, thudding bass. She could feel her heartbeat sync to it when she got drowsy, as though the anthems of obnoxious top-down convertible stereo systems were a gentle murmured lullaby. The beat pulsed through the floor, shook the walls, made her canvas brush strokes unsteady. Or maybe that was just a convenient excuse for the trembling of her hands.

She took a pill. It did nothing to boost her mood - Hennessy had tried plenty of uppers that wrung serotonin out of her brain, but she'd never found a high worth the crash afterward. The stimulant did let her paint into the middle of the night as hours slid around her, though; when she started to fade, she took another.

The process of painting itself didn’t even bring her pleasure. That wasn’t the painting’s fault, though. Nothing brought her true pleasure these days. Art did the best it could, which was to soothe her frayed edges until the howling haunting dogs weren’t so toothful.

Hennessy did not consider herself an “addict” so much as a “routine medicinal user of illegal substances.” To be an addict, she was pretty sure, you needed to be obsessed with the drugs. With the high. With getting your next fix. She wasn’t particularly in love with stimulants, but they served their purpose, and she did want to avoid unconsciousness. Medicinal, methodical. Healthcare was a farce and she had the right to do what she fucking wanted.

She could, with ample supplies and willpower, stave off sleep for four to seven days. Her record was nine, though there’d been a few catnaps inbetween. The trick was timing the doses and caffeine intake to avoid getting so tired that consciousness was more miserable than the nightmares. People were not supposed to have caffeine with the drugs, but that was less a fatal mistake than a slow-decay one. She chain-smoked like a motherfucker, what did she care if an energy drink stressed her heart?

Sleep would have to happen eventually. She did not believe it had to happen every single night. The human body could not possibly be built to spend a third of its lifespan unconscious.

She painted through the night, and then she drew the heavy curtains over the windows and painted through the day, too. True artists and forgers used natural light to double-check their color balances, sunshine acting as the world’s great equalizer. Hennessy preferred to be a goddamn vampire.

That evening - the day after leaving Ronan, thirty-something hours since she’d last slept - she got tired of painting. Closed her eyes for five minutes. Popped another pill, even though she had no game plan for what to do with her improved consciousness. _Get it together, Hennessy._

She defaulted to an eternally-available pastime of seeking companionship from the partygoers in the main mansion. The crowd tended to rotate. It was a fucking wonder the cops hadn’t shut the whole thing down yet. Someone might have them in their pocket. It would do Hennessy good to know _which_ people had cop-bribing connections, so she could keep them around, but that felt like a lot of effort when she didn't give a shit.

Her arrival in the crowd also had hit-or-miss reception. Sometimes more than one person wanted her dead. Sometimes the majority of people had no idea who she was. Sometimes the majority of people wanted to worship at her feet, an adoring entourage of two-dimensional arm candy. Life was a music video. Nothing existed beyond the glitter and the lights and the next take.

Everyone was boring tonight. Some recognition, some lust, some hatred, some blankness. Boring, boring, boring. Maybe she wasn’t in the mood. Maybe the lowlifes and criminals and college students guest touring in an aesthetically rock-bottom utopia were uglier than usual. Maybe she was higher than she thought, or not high enough. Maybe she was tired.

She thought about the blanket Ronan had thrown over her when she’d woken up. She didn’t mean to think about it, but the image was difficult to banish once it arose. The comfort hadn’t stopped the nightmares or the panic, but she’d come out of it feeling - safe, maybe. Not safe like something secured, restrained, imprisoned. Safe like something that had no reason to think it might be unsafe.

She’d woken up on the couch in his sunshiney apartment, and the nightmare had stayed inside her head, and then it had dissipated like mist. Like bad dreams were supposed to in minds that weren't ruined.

The whole thing pissed her off. Not the mental image itself, but the inability to shake it. She’d well and truly burned her bridges there, and good fucking riddance. Hennessy the warrior queen was not capable of love or trust or symbiotic relationships. She was a parasite. All fangs.

That was how she wanted it. That was how she liked it. Fuck Ronan Lynch and his shitty soft couch.

She made out with three different people. The third wanted her both kissed and killed, which Hennessy knew going in, because that seemed interesting. Hennessy came away from it with a bitten-bloody lip, and the other girl ended up with a stab wound to the leg, but Hennessy hadn’t hit an artery. She’d be fine. Probably.

None of this satisfied her. Hennessy hadn’t expected the endeavors to make her _happy,_ but she’d at least hoped not to be _bored._ No benevolent gods smiling down on her, she supposed. She returned to her rooms and covered her soul mark with a truly impressive layering of cosmetics, until all that remained was a smooth expanse of seemingly-uncovered brown skin. Covering it wouldn't really affect anything - she still looked claimed with her faked marks, and anyone who knew the darkened thorny silhouette would recognize its absence. She wasn't hiding anything. It just made her feel better not to have it there.

Probably she needed to get out. Too much time in the darkened studio, too much time in the derelict mansion, too much time avoiding the sunlight and the stars. She’d trade one pulsing beat for another. She called a rideshare and stalked into a favored nightclub looking delicious, expensive, impossible to touch. The beat inside was heavy enough to reverberate through the air, shake your skull. After ten minutes of dancing, she found herself a seat at the bar to shake off her fatigue, and then she did what she should have done in the first place and texted Adam Parrish.

Not for help or guidance or comfort or what-fucking-ever. For obvious reasons, he was a clearly designated NO on the chart of People Likely To Put Up With Needy Bullshit. She didn’t feel needy. She felt antsy and keyed-up, and Adam was the only person besides her very off-limits soulmate who’d interested her in days.

Because he appeared to be a practical person who didn’t give a shit about drama, probably, he wouldn’t show up.

The fact that he did _immediately_ made him a hundred times more interesting.

-

Adam didn’t answer Hennessy’s invitation to meet because he was desperate to see her. His entire post-lunch day had been a half-distracted haze of worry about Ronan, anticipation of Gansey, and some very annoying butterflies that he should have outgrown at about age fifteen. He wanted to go home and take a hot shower and lay in bed catching up with Gansey until he fell asleep midsentence. He wanted to turn Ronan's words over, peel them apart, paste them together, until he understood every facet of what had been said.

But Hennessy continued to be a wildcard, and Adam was worried that if he didn’t go, she’d text Ronan instead. And Ronan would _definitely_ go.

It wasn’t some grand, tragic, heroic sacrifice. Gansey and Ronan would still be home when he arrived later. He was just postponing the relaxation. Adam knew quite a bit about suffering and sacrifice, and so he spared a single moment to marvel at how _easy_ his life had become if _this_ was his chief complaint.

Then he continued complaining anyway, because it felt good to whine about something so inconsequential.

The address Hennessy texted turned out to be a hole-in-the-wall EDM monstrosity that played Ronan’s type of music over an atmosphere that would give Ronan hives. She responded to his (polite, removed) request to meet up outside with a _nah,_ so Adam pinched the bridge of his nose and gritted his teeth and headed in.

He found her at the bar, which was good, because he would have turned around and left if she'd wanted him to dance. There was an open seat beside her, reserved by her lovingly-placed backpack. She had three different drinks in front of her, all in varying states of partially-drunk. He wondered whether she’d paid for any of them.

She said something - shouted something - as he picked her backpack up and sat down. He handed the bag over and studied her. The party girl shell was impeccable. There were some people at parties who wanted to entertain, and some who demanded entertainment. Glimmering stars and curving black holes. 

Hennessy was one of the latter. It was apparent just from how she held herself, suffused with contempt like an unholy elixir. It was a pretty Ronan-like posture, actually, Adam noted, except that Ronan lacked any interest in the validation of strangers.

She spoke again. Continued speaking, actually. Adam had been sure he didn't care what she had to say, and the longer she talked, the more vindicated he felt. He lifted an eyebrow. Irritated, she leaned in and raised her volume, which might have worked for the average person. Adam shrugged, disinterested. Hennessy’s nostrils flared. The strobe lights made a fractured prism of her teeth as she sneered at him. She appeared to accept the silent game, returned her attention to the bartender, made it exactly ninety-eight seconds, and then snapped something at Adam. _What is your deal_ or _What is your problem,_ he was pretty sure, by the shape of her mouth and the expression on her face.

Even Ronan had more patience. Good God. Adam took pity on her and tapped out a message on his phone. His voice would do the job perfectly well; he just didn’t feel like shouting. _Can’t hear anything in here I’m hard of hearing. Sorry missed all your prose. I’m sure it was clever_

Hennessy raised her eyebrow right back at him. Immediately upon explanation, her irritation melted away. _That_ was interesting. Did she not like being left out of a joke, or being ignored, or being kept in the dark about information?

_shouldve mentioned that b4 i wasted all my good material_

_I did ask you to meet me outside_

_outside is for heathens and ppl who want to breathe air that’s not 90% carbon dioxide exhalation from a million bodies crammed in one space_

_I like oxygen_

_boring_

But she unzipped the backpack, dug out a wallet, and slapped a wad of cash down on the bar. Apparently she hadn’t been drinking for free. Apparently she had expensive taste, too; the outermost bill was a fifty.

Hennessy made a grand, sweeping gesture toward the club doors as if to illustrate the level of inconvenience Adam was causing her. Adam bit down on the inside of his cheek to stifle a laugh. She didn’t look like she was mid-crisis, and her movements were too dramatic for him to summon up proper anger. The behavior should have exhausted him, except that it kind of reminded him of Ronan. Or Henry. A godawful unholy mix of the two.

Adam did not want to feel fondness toward her, but on the bright side, he was fairly certain the emotion would dissipate as soon as she opened her mouth.

The club had been hot, stifling, all sweat and body heat and rough breath and high-powered lights. Adam’s first gasp of outdoor air felt an awful lot like what Ronan must experience stepping foot on farmland after days in the city.

“People should just shut themselves in a coffin for the same effect,” Adam said once they’d made it three blocks from the godforsaken establishment. "Cheaper. Cleaner. Simpler."

“It’s all about the parody of intimacy,” Hennessy said. She dug a pack of cigarettes out of a pocket in the open denim jacket she wore over her lace bralet. Ronan’s soul mark had mysteriously vanished from her ribs. Makeup rather than ink, Adam thought - he didn't know much about makeup, but did know a coverup tat wouldn't be healed yet.

“It’s a slow death.”

“Like I said. Intimacy.” Lighting the cigarette, she continued, “Not all of us are so blessed to have constantly-available lovers we want to touch. Your geese and sexy golden eggs. We lowly loveless must craft a bacchanal to satisfy our wretched selves. The hotter it is, the harder to breathe, the closer the sensation gets to love. We are all taking ecstasy and grinding under strobe lights for the desperate illusion that there’s another human being out there, somewhere, far off in the ether, who might touch or care for or hold us. Walking goddamn tragedies. Give it a try sometime.”

Adam did not find himself moved by this ponderous philosophy. “Pretty sure literally everything you just said was horseshit, but alright.”

“The suffering I endure in this house,” she said. They'd gone far enough to meander beside a park, now, so it was not a house so much as a branching tree cover at best. “I bestow these truths of the human condition upon you and all I receive is disdain. A modern day Cassandra, I am.”

“Cassandra didn’t tell truths about the human condition,” Adam said. “She told truths about the future.”

“Are the future and the human condition not the same thing?”

“If you’re talking how mankind's trajectory shapes the world over time, sure. If you’re talking a mixture of half-assed concepts to sound smart, just look up the SparkNotes next time to double-check your references.”

Hennessy spent a ponderous minute puffing on her cigarette. Like everything else, it was an affected gesture. It said that she had all the time in the world and did not care to consider mere mortals. It said that she was not contemplating what her conversational partner had just said, and that the conversational partner was also not important enough to warrant her wisdom. Adam appreciated the performance she’d put into her stall tactics the same way he appreciated any person's talent for bullshit. It wasn't respect, exactly. More of an eye-rolling acknowledgement.

“I’ve decided I will only be referencing pop culture icons from now on, all of whom I’m sure you will be unfamiliar with. This is the punishment for questioning my prudence. The same futility as debating whether Beyonce or Rihanna is a better musician.”

“Oh, yeah, I don’t know those names,” Adam said. “You’re basically speaking ancient Greek.”

Hennessy laughed. Adam was surprised and then annoyed to discover he was pleased about it. “Oh, God, I trapped myself anyway. I don’t even have opinions on them. I don’t know _shit_ about pop culture. I know what songs make my heart beat fast and that’s about it.”

“Don’t know shit about pop culture, don’t know shit about mythology, don’t know shit about the human condition,” Adam said, ticking them off on his fingers. “Your batting average is pretty damn low.”

“Ye of little faith.” She was relaxing, though, more at ease than Adam had seen her yet. “I was made for grander stuff than your _facts_ and _knowledge.”_

“Such as?”

“Cars that go vroom. Parties. Basking in the limelight.”

Exactly one of these topics interested Adam. “I think all cars technically go vroom.”

“Supposedly the hybrid electric models purr. Like a satisfied kitten. I prefer engines with a growl. Or a roar.”

“What’s your favorite?”

Hennessy glanced at him, her mouth curving wickedly. She didn’t look angry, though - Adam was well-tuned toward anger, even after all this time. “Oh, big man wants to school me about cars, yeah? Name five songs your ideal turbo engine screams when it breaks down or you’re a fake fan. I’m not so motherfucking elitist. I like the ones that go fast.”

Adam had the sudden and very conscious realization that he was enjoying this interaction. This seemed like an excellent reason to bolt, except he couldn’t figure out a way to extricate himself from the conversation without her thinking she’d won. _Won what?_ There was no prize except Adam's intolerable knowledge of her smugness.

“I always wanted an Audi when I was in high school,” he mused. “Wasn’t preferential on the model.”

“Oh, God, you’re one of _those.”_ Now it was Adam’s turn to laugh, not because he was surprised so much as because her reaction was _exactly_ what he’d thought it would be.

“What’s wrong with an Audi?”

“All status, no flash. Cars you buy to tell people you’re rich. Has anyone in the world ever enjoyed driving an _Audi?_ Let me just park my shitty expensive asshole luxury eyesore in my reserved parking space before I go into my corporate job wearing my ten thousand dollar suit and then eat my gun after three months. I’d rather be made to dig my own grave. Bury me alive before you let me own an _Audi._ ”

“That seems extreme,” Adam said. “I’m told they have excellent handling.”

“Oh, God.” Hennessy glanced around, possibly for a fainting chaise in the middle of the sidewalk. Finding the park benches unsatisfactory, she slung an arm around Adam’s shoulders instead, staggering against him. “Parrish. Tell me you’ve become a better man. I’ll never be able to weather the shame of my miscalculation.”

“They’re a very sleek and austere type of car,” Adam said. “The aesthetic is widely acclaimed.” He was fighting so hard not to laugh that his ribs hurt. The physical contact was yet another detail that should have bothered him, except that she’d telegraphed her motion like the rest of her grandiose gestures - she hadn’t been trying to startle him.

“Parrish.” She gave up on walking altogether and just sagged where she was, as though she was a corpse he was trying to hide. The sudden weight sent him to a knee mid-sidewalk. Hennessy did not appear perturbed. “Parrish,” she repeated, clapping both hands on his shoulders, facing him with the wide-eyed dismay of a soldier huddling behind a flimsy barricade under gunfire, “tell me you are more than a shitty gets-his-own Wall Street aspirational asshole. Do not force me to seek vengeance for my wasted time.”

“I’m not sure I’m more than that,” Adam said, which was true. “Opted for a bike instead of an Audi, though.”

A strolling couple edged around them on the sidewalk. They didn’t stop or glance back, but their footsteps were a little hurried. Hennessy, either undeterred by or encouraged by the publicity, fell backward onto the asphalt spread out like a child making snow angels. “God is good. I’ve found religion.”

“Some asshole’s sneaker is gonna break your wrist,” Adam said, holding out a hand. “God can still speak through you if you're standing up.”

Hennessy took the hand and allowed Adam to pull her back to her feet. “I have gravel in my hair,” she observed. Said hair was worn out rather than pulled back, currently, in a style Adam suspected had taken work to maintain. This style had also effectively maximized the hair-to-gravel surface contact area.

“That happens when you lay on the sidewalk,” Adam informed her.

“Sometimes I cause myself little future inconveniences to keep life interesting. Endlessly populating quest list.” Hennessy stretched and resumed walking. She was no longer leaning on Adam, but she was a little wobbly. “Where were we? Your bike.”

“It’s a bike. It goes fast. The engine growls.” Adam sped up to match her, not just to keep her in hearing range but also because he thought she might fall over. “You know Audis, though. Not totally ignorant about different models. Which ones do _you_ think are worth it?”

“Oh, I’m trapped in a love affair with the Porsche 911. Horrifically stereotypical of me. I’m a curse to my gender and I want one in hot pink with hand-done bedazzling. The crystals are allowed to fuck with the aerodynamics but nothing else can. It must look like the inside of an overly enthusiastic crafting cat lady’s studio vomited onto a sexy, sexy sportscar.” She pondered. “But I’d take one of the latest Camaro models, too, if you had a gun to my head and _forced_ me to pick a fabulous vehicle to drive indefinitely. They handle like a _dream._ That power fantasy, too, tap your foot against the gas and you’re Mad fucking Max. A speck of dust lands on the pedal, suddenly you’re in Timbuktu.”

“Huh,” Adam said.

“‘Huh?’ I bare my hopes and dreams and darkest desires to you and you give me ‘huh’?”

Adam was highly doubtful that these were her darkest desires. “Gansey’s got a 1973 Camaro is all.” He wasn't sure Ronan had told her who Gansey was, but the idea of deciding between 'another partner' and 'Ronan's soulmate' was unpleasant, so Adam offered the name without definition.

“Oh, poor thing,” Hennessy said. Adam assumed she meant Gansey, until she continued, “Locked away in some showroom gathering dust until a valet can come polish her once a year. Crueler fates couldn’t be conceived by the devil himself.”

“Nah, he drives it,” Adam said. “Which might be more unconscionable. It’s like trying to convince a geriatric horse not to break its legs at a gallop because you pat its neck real soft.”

“I can’t believe I have to steal his car.”

“Do not.”

“I can’t believe the universe has just tipped a new life purpose straight into my lap.”

The thing was that Adam was almost certain she _could_ steal the Camaro, if she set her mind to it. Pretense of vapid party girl aside, she had a keenness and quickness that reeked of survival instinct. She wasn't stupid. She liked to appear as though her vocabulary was the extent of her intelligence, but Adam didn't think the girl underneath the shell was shallow or empty. He just didn't know what adjectives _did_ describe her. Dangerous, maybe. Vicious. Unpredictable.

The realization troubled him. It meant he’d begun appreciating more things about her than he hated.

“The Camaro has been through enough,” he said. “Be nice to it.”

“Do I look nice to you, asshole? Oh, one moment.” She held up a hand as if taking a phone call, then sat down on a bench beside them and unzipped her backpack. “Up in a tick. This evening's program has briefly switched to white snow static.”

Adam stepped off the sidewalk to stand beside the bench. She’d managed to take up the entire sitting area with the combination of splayed legs and backpack. It was an intentional posture that did not invite him to join her, and he studied her carefully. “Your shoes bothering you?” 

This wouldn't have surprised him. She was wearing the killer heels again, the same boots she’d been wearing when Ronan brought her home, which didn’t seem like very practical footwear for clubbing. Or for wearing anywhere, ever.

“Brief dip in the revelry.” She fished out a Ziploc bag, removed a pill, and downed it with a swig of blue Gatorade.

Adam sighed. “I don’t suppose that’s your unconventional way of carrying your... thyroid medication?”

 _“Thyroid medication?”_ She stared at him, gleeful. _“That’s_ your go-to option? Isn’t thyroid medication taken daily, not as-needed? Get it together, man.”

“Work’s doing a thyroid-related study and I immediately blanked on every other organ system. Have you been high this whole time?”

“Relax, you hypermoralistic D.A.R.E. representative,” she said, pronouncing each individual letter in the acronym like separate curses. “I’m just awake. I promise I’m exactly as hilarious and delightful not on drugs.”

Considering Hennessy not-on-drugs had been about to hurl herself in front of a moving train, Adam suspected this statement was facetious. His initial dismay had already given way to annoyance and pragmatism, though. “Alright. You should drink the rest of the Gatorade. Stimulants dry your mouth out and we’ve walked forever.”

“Do I sound hoarse to you? You think a bitch with dry mouth can articulate like this?” She did tip back the bottle, though, swigging the rest like she was downing a series of alcohol shots.

“When did you last eat?”

“Hm.” She considered this. “That is an excellent question. I’ll have my receptionist review my daily activity logs and get back to you.”

“Why did you want me to come out tonight?”

“Certainly not to receive this kind of lecture,” she said. “I could have mainlined a 90s elementary school Dangers of Drugs series instead.”

Adam took a breath and held it. His first instinct was to snap back; long years of practice with Ronan’s defensiveness urged him not to pour gasoline on the fire. He exhaled. “I’m not lecturing. I’m judging. There’s a difference. Lecturing implies I'm trying to change you. Judging just means I think you're a moron.”

“Well, at least you’re honest.” Hennessy stood up, half-turned her ankle in her ridiculous boots, staggered. Adam caught her arm and nudged her back down.

“Stay here. I’m gonna grab some water and shitty fried food at the 7-11 up there.” He nodded at the glowing neon sign a block away. “You have any allergies?”

“The tears of children. The song of a humpback whale, but only if I'm underwater. Oh, you meant to food. No, I’m a garbage disposal.”

Adam checked the time on his phone. He’d already been out later than anticipated. He’d budgeted for a hissy argument and quick parting, and then he'd lost track of time. Ronan and Gansey knew that he’d be out late, although he’d been reticent about the reason. Which was to say, he’d told them the reason was that a couple colleagues were going out for drinks to celebrate a coworker’s birthday.

He knew this had the potential to cause problems. He knew it _was_ a problem, since Lying To Boyfriends Is Bad. It also intensified the guilt of enjoying Hennessy’s company, even though he’d crossed no physical or emotional boundaries. It wasn't a disloyalty guilt so much as an I-was-supposed-to-hate-this-and-then-it-didn't-suck-and-I'm-not-sure-how-to-reconcile-the-lie-now guilt. He knew he should head home. He knew that Hennessy had been taking care of herself for far longer than Adam had known of her existence. He knew she had a phone, money, the ability to get a ride back to wherever the hell she lived.

He also couldn’t justify leaving her alone, high, and hungry in the middle of the city just because she was a consequence-ignoring asshole.

He texted the tiny three-icon group chat that included himself, Ronan and Gansey: _Be a little later have dinner without me. See you soon_

“Going to turn into a pumpkin?” Hennessy guessed.

And so Adam was gonna have to come clean about it as soon as he got home. Not because of guilt, but because Hennessy had Ronan’s number, which meant she had leverage. If Adam made the deception into an active lie, she could either blackmail him or tell Ronan herself to watch the chaos unfold. Adam wasn't stupid enough to keep such an easily-shattered falsehood intact. He hadn't meant anything malicious by the lie, anyway. It was just that in the allotted time, he hadn't hatched a less-shitty plan for keeping the peace. He didn't know how to explain his planned evening in a way that wouldn't cause conflict.

Rather than answering, he said, “Don’t be shitty just because I don't like your dumbass choices. Ronan acts like an asshole when he's hurt, too. I can see it a mile away and my patience gets real thin real fast.”

Hennessy appraised him. She looked pleased by the use of Ronan’s name as an exasperated descriptor, though whether that was because Adam loved Ronan or because she enjoyed Ronan-based negativity was hard to say.

“Bring me the horrible grease vat, noble knight,” she said. “I will park my fair maiden arse right here and await your return.”

“Try not to get murdered the second I turn my back.”

“I’d never dream of such a thing. I murder only. Being murdered is so gauche.”

It would have to do. Adam shook his head and half-jogged to the 7-11. His reflection in the sickly neon lights said _asshat._ Trying to procure a tension-free explanation for Gansey and Ronan wasn't helping, so Adam shook his head and set the worry aside. One step at a time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i had originally planned for this chapter to be some ronan and gansey content, but too many words without hennessy causes me to wither like a plant deprived of sunlight. so next chapter!


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> some of ronan's history is touched on, ronan and gansey love each other, ronan and adam manage to have a functional conversation instead of fighting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some potentially upsetting stuff in here re: toxic relationships, esp with ronan's history / complicated feelings
> 
> other than that, though, this chapter contains very little conflict and very lot kids supporting each other

When Ronan entered the apartment, he discovered Gansey making eggs. Or rather, smelled the catastrophe of Gansey attempting eggs. "Don't come in here," Gansey said by way of greeting. "I was trying to do something nice, which was a terrible idea." 

The living room and kitchen had become hazard zones of Eau de Burnt Yolk. "I think I've got a pretty good fucking idea what's happening in there," Ronan said. "You always suck at cooking eggs."

"You really don't keep any ingredients in your cupboards," Gansey told him, reproachfully.

“Obviously. If _I_ start cooking, people will _expect_ things from me.”

“Expect you to make an occasional meal containing nutritional content?”

“Can you even fucking _imagine?”_

They’d managed to have this conversation without being face-to-face, as Ronan pulled off his boots and removed his jacket. When he walked around to the little kitchen unit, though, he found Gansey laughing. “You never want to surprise people?”

“Absolutely fucking not.” 

Ronan wrapped both his arms around Gansey, curling over him like a flower bending in the sun. Gansey was warm and solid and real, and Ronan immediately felt some of his continued buzzing quiet.

This conversation was a joke. It was a joke because Ronan and Gansey had both been each other’s first realized soulmate, which meant they’d each seen the other through pretty much every heartbreak and trauma and embarrassing teen phase. While cohabitating in high school, they’d managed to survive on pizza, Chinese takeout, and potato chips. Exclusively. Ronan had avoided eating a fresh vegetable for about two straight years.

Gansey’s current interest in cooking was not an inherent fascination. He’d had the ability when they were kids, Ronan was sure, just like Ronan himself had. Long summer evenings spent peeling potatoes and shucking corn for dinner, grass and wildflowers between his bare toes, fruits plucked from trees that didn’t grow anywhere else. Ronan had spent enough time around his mother to know how to create love-in-meal-form with raw ingredients. He’d simply lost interest when he stopped having a mother. And Gansey’s family only cooked to brag about their skill, never to nurture. No sentiment lost there.

But Gansey did tend to pick up habits and interests from the people surrounding him, and Blue was a stickler about not eating like a frat boy. Ronan wasn’t sure where Cheng fell on the scale. He was too flaky for Ronan to imagine him adhering to a pre-planned dinner schedule. On the other hand, he enjoyed any activity that scored him more time with his partners, which Ronan grudgingly respected when it didn’t place them in competition.

Gansey turned away from the sad burnt egg corpses on the stove and hugged Ronan back. “Missed you.”

It hadn’t been that long since they’d last seen each other. Ronan felt every second like a stretched-out year. “You got shorter.”

“And yet somehow you did not change at all,” Gansey said dryly.

Ronan reached over and turned off the burner, since nothing on the stove seemed like it would become edible anytime soon. Gansey took a step back. His eyes lit properly on Hennessy’s soul mark for the first time and stayed there. Ronan had explained the situation in bare-bones detail on the phone, but he knew that wasn’t the same as seeing the evidence. Here it was, full-color damnation proving Ronan Lynch had changed. Or was supposed to change. Or was doomed to change.

Gansey didn’t try to assemble his face into the expression he thought Ronan wanted. They’d left that kind of non-transparent bullshit behind ages ago. So he just looked at the soul mark, pensive and quiet, academic interest outweighing any visible emotional reaction.

After a half-minute, he raised a hand to the strap of Ronan’s tank. “May I?”

Ronan shrugged.

Gansey pushed it aside so that he could see the entire mark uncovered. His fingertips ghosted feather-light across the skin, more a whisper of electric current than a real touch.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

Ronan shrugged again.

“Will it be upsetting? If I talk about it?”

Gansey liked to ask. This was both because Gansey’s emotional intuition was shit and because Ronan’s own limits were a moving target. A joke that made him laugh one day could make him want to punch holes in plaster the next. There was no guessing where the scale landed at any given moment.

Ronan considered. “I don’t really want to fucking tiptoe around it. The mark, at least. You’re on thin fucking ice with everything else.”

It was a little difficult to talk about a soul mark without talking about the soulmate in question, but at least this gave Ronan the pretense of removal. A refined, detached art critique. As if Gansey was a well-known connoisseur of the art world.

“Beautiful,” Gansey murmured again, soft. “It’s so different colored in.”

Ronan freed himself from Gansey’s gaze by scraping the mess on the pan and stove into the trash can. But then he took Gansey by the arm and dragged him over to the couch, laying down on his back. The bed would have made more sense, except that Ronan wanted Gansey to squish him against the cushions until he felt grounded, and a full-sized mattress simply had too much room to splay.

Gansey accepted the unspoken request, wiggling around until he was wedged half on Ronan and half against the back of the couch. He then continued his trace of the petals with his fingertips.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Ronan said.

Gansey’s smile was sympathetic without teetering too close to pity. “I’m just looking at some lovely artwork, Ronan. It's not that deep.”

This was most assuredly bullshit. Gansey managed to find meaning and symbolism in the most asinine of coincidence - he couldn’t help connecting the mark to the stranger it belonged to. But Ronan wanted to ease into this. Or maybe just pretend, as if he’d ever tolerate this kind of lying bullshit from anyone else. So he closed his eyes and tipped his head back rather than responding.

“There are a lot of little gradients and color details you couldn’t see with the silhouette,” Gansey said. “It’s easier to make out the different petals, too. Did you ever find out what kind of flower it is?”

“Who gives a fuck?” The type of flower wasn’t going to give him some mystical insight into Hennessy’s soul.

“Well, we figured out Jane’s feathers are most likely raven. It’s not like we’ve never been curious.”

“This one isn’t fun for me.” None of them had been fun for Ronan, really, but Hennessy’s had soured in record time. “I don’t want it.”

Gansey laid his head against Ronan’s shoulder, ceasing his fingertip-to-mark touches in favor of hugging him instead. “Maybe we can find someone to ink over it.”

Ronan’s hand did a sort of reflexive jerk, like he’d been unexpectedly shocked. The emotion hit him a half-second later. He couldn’t put a single label on it except a startled yelp of _NO._

“Or not,” Gansey said.

Ronan half-growled. It was more warning than anger, though, especially with Gansey’s warm weight keeping his untethered thoughts from floating away. “You said that on purpose.”

Gansey paused. Then he said, puzzled, “Yes, I put the sentence together in my mind and used my vocal muscles to express it. On purpose. You might try that sometime. The results are fascinating.”

“You said that to get a _rise_ out of me.”

Gansey didn’t apologize, which was fine. It would have annoyed Ronan if he had. “Mmm.”

“Just tell me what you’re thinking, man. Don’t fuck with me.”

Gansey was quiet for a long time. Too long. His breathing hadn’t eased into the steady rhythm of sleep, so Ronan knew he was conscious. There weren’t a lot of things Gansey was afraid to say to Ronan, anymore. That he wasn’t answering made Ronan's stomach knot.

“Am I allowed to say his name?” Gansey finally murmured.

Ronan did not ask for clarification. Asking for clarification would have meant hearing the name, and he already knew who Gansey meant. “No. Off-limits. Get the hell off me.”

“Okay,” Gansey said, climbing off of Ronan and sliding onto the floor.

But Gansey was thinking it, and Ronan knew that Adam was thinking it, too. Someone around him was gonna make him face the music sooner or later.

So he thought the name for the first time, consciously, since he’d grabbed Hennessy on the subway platform.

_Joseph Kavinsky._

There it was. He’d thought it. He was thinking it. Holding it in his mind. Kavinsky had been dead for years, and time tended to separate him from Ronan’s thoughts. It was impossible to be consumed by memories of a dead boy when making new memories, layers upon layers of silt over the bedrock. Ronan wasn’t messed up over Kavinsky. This was both true in that he lived a life free of Kavinsky-centric obsession, and in that Kavinsky had done far worse than mess him up.

_Ruined._

The thing about this particular asinine backstory was that Ronan could not think about it. The deal had been struck with his own consciousness to preserve sanity, growth, survival. He could not think about it because thinking about it would kill him. 

That wasn’t to say that he was repressing the trauma, refusing to acknowledge the pain, postponing some healing journey that would end in catharsis. This wasn’t a first-step-forward circumstance. Ronan had done the work. He’d processed. He’d gone to therapy, unpacked the bullshit, even made an occasional effort in sessions. He understood the situation. He understood that his complicated feelings were valid, that he wasn’t technically at fault, that Kavinsky’s own choices were to blame more than Ronan’s ever could be. 

Ronan had _done_ the work.

That was how he knew thinking about it would kill him.

Somewhere out there was a universe in which Ronan had never left Kavinsky, and Kavinsky had never died.

Somewhere out there were far more universes in which Ronan had never left Kavinsky, and now Ronan and Kavinsky were both dead.

This was not a name the demon, feel better, kick its ass scenario. When Ronan’s mind accidentally remembered Kavinsky, it was like grazing a hot stove. Trying to think about him now, consciously, applying the itchy old wounds to the current situation like someone who’d done their psychoanalysis homework - that was Ronan pressing his entire hand against the burner and holding it there. Flesh blackened. Nerves screamed and then died, numbing forever against new feeling.

He pulled away from the mental hotbed, let Kavinsky’s memory float back into the eldritch depths where it belonged. Just one more weapon inside a mind with a personalized self-destruction arsenal.

“Gansey,” he said.

Gansey lifted Ronan’s hand to his mouth, kissing his knuckles.

“I can’t do it again,” Ronan said.

Gansey pressed Ronan’s hand against his cheek, closing his eyes, his exhale the softest breath. “I know.”

Most people wouldn’t know. Ronan would never be able to explain the killing thing inside him in words, even if he could quantify it to himself. But Gansey had been there for the whole fucked-up situation. Gansey, Ronan’s first soulmate, a boy with a smile like the sun and an ache for meaning that haunted him. Kavinsky, Ronan’s second, the one who’d helpfully exposed all the romanticization as the heaping crock of bullshit it was.

Sometimes Ronan thought he’d never be anything to Gansey except what Kavinsky had been to him.

That was another thought that would kill him if he let it.

This wasn’t something to lay at Gansey’s door. That really would make him like Kavinsky. Ronan didn’t need Gansey to save him, though - this wasn’t something Gansey could protect him from, no matter how hard he tried. He just needed someone to _know._ It was melodramatic, maybe, to pin mortality and fate and mental health on a potential future that hadn’t even happened. But Ronan needed someone to know that he was dying.

Gansey and Ronan had met weeks before disaster, loved every shining facet of each other, and then forged their relationship in fire while they both decayed. Noah was the only other partner Ronan had who would understand the feelings themselves, but he’d been blessedly spared the worst of this messy history. Ronan didn’t often need Gansey like he once had, these days - he’d grown into himself and learned to live in his skin and made peace with the ugliness inside him.

But he needed Gansey now.

Neither Adam nor Blue quite understood it. They’d both learned how to settle Ronan and stay with him, but they didn’t _know._ This wasn’t some kind of case in which Ronan’s soulbound fates were better at comprehending him than the non-soulmates.

Adam was hardwired for survival. Ronan knew this, admired it, loved it. But it meant that Adam didn’t comprehend some of what Ronan found most important. If Adam had ever accepted failure as an inevitability growing up, the best he could hope for now would be misery. Worst case scenario, he’d be six feet under. Ronan could tell Adam, _This is killing me,_ and Adam would skip straight over the pain of dying and right into problem solving. In Adam’s mind, there was always a solution, and if there wasn’t, he’d create one. Which was fine - great, even, when Ronan’s own mind refused to fix anything.

But Adam would never understand how Ronan needed to sit with the pain. Feel it out, define the shape, give the entity a name and a threat level. Pain, for Adam, was something to resolve immediately. Marinating in it seemed like a colossal waste of time. He wouldn’t accept the idea of a pain that had to be reasoned with instead of fought tooth and nail.

Blue’s outlook was similar, though she veered less battle-hardened soldier and more relentless pragmatist. Blue understood the need to reason with some pains. She’d grown up well-versed in the fluid language of compromise. Ronan could tell her, _I can’t do it again,_ and she would understand the grief, and the longing, and the fear, and the emptiness. But she wouldn’t sit with them. She’d already be reframing: What _can_ you do, then? How do we keep this from being like the last time? How do we find an ending that's survivable?

Also extremely helpful, when that was what Ronan needed. It wasn’t what he needed now.

Gansey sat quietly on the floor and leaned until his head rested against Ronan’s side. Ronan stared at the ceiling. His breath rasped. It was a relief to let the tears come, trickling from the corners of his eyes to soak the couch cushion below him. Gansey didn’t try to soothe or shush or deescalate, and Ronan stopped trying to hold in his awful noises, and the two of them stayed like that for an hour as Ronan let the tide wreck him.

The episode passed when Ronan’s body decided it had shed enough chemical shittiness to restore equilibrium. He caught his breath, body trembling, head dully aching. Gansey kissed his knuckles again and rose for the first time in forever, returning a few moments later with a box of tissues and bottle of water.

Ronan blew his nose. The upside of the crying jag was that he felt a lot better, mentally speaking. The downside was that, physically speaking, his body was now a cranky old man yelling _why_ at the rotten kids on his lawn.

“Thanks, man,” he said. It wasn’t just for the tissues. 

Gansey’s mouth curved into a soft, rueful smile. “Anytime.”

“I don’t want her to die.” 

Ronan could say this, now that he’d stopped drowning. It made him feel better to say it out loud. _Like I even fucking care,_ he’d told himself, but God, he cared. It turned out that he cared a whole fucking lot.

“I know.”

“I don’t want her to be alone.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want it to be my fault.”

This last was dangerous to voice because Ronan already knew all the responses. _It won’t be. You don’t have to save anyone. People make their own choices. It’s not all on you. You don’t have to blame yourself every time someone near you dies._

These responses were fine. True, even. They wouldn’t tell Ronan anything he didn’t already know.

Ronan watched Gansey’s face as he mentally considered and discarded each truthful response. Gansey knew that Ronan knew all of them already. He knew Ronan didn’t need a reminder, a shut-up-you’re-irrational-get-over-it. 

There was silence between them for a long minute.

Gansey said, quietly, “I love you so much.”

This had the unfortunate side effect of making Ronan cry, again, as if he hadn’t suffered enough sinus pressure from the first episode. Fuck his life. 

At least this bout of tears was gentler and more short-lived, accompanied by a healthy dose of real-time irritation about the whole thing. Which was to say, at least Ronan was starting to feel like himself again.

By the time he was done acting like a confused, cliched, hormonal preteen, Gansey had climbed onto the couch and wedged himself once again between Ronan and the cushions. His body was a warm weight, his head tucked against Ronan's shoulder.

Gansey did him the courtesy of waiting until he had his breath back before he said, “You love her.” Fact rather than question.

This did not make Ronan cry. Mostly, it annoyed him. _Gansey_ was not the annoying entity here - the truth of the statement was.

Ronan didn’t deny it, because he was tired of lying. Yeah, he loved her. He’d known her barely a day, exchanged some boring trauma feelings, been held at knifepoint, shoved her into a table, and vividly considered throttling her. Most of these had not been loving actions. Ronan was not generally a loving person. Love took too much out of him - he had to be cautious about where he invested it.

Loving Hennessy was a disaster. It felt like a choice that had been made for him rather than a calculated decision. Adam had accused him of having a socially-induced savior complex - that comment had been pointed cruelty, since Adam knew exactly fucking where Ronan’s terror came from. But Ronan didn’t think it was _true._ He wasn’t obsessing about what it meant for him to be Hennessy’s designated savior. He was obsessing about how much he wanted her not to be dead.

Ronan didn’t want to love her. Love, for Ronan, meant that he’d tucked a piece of himself inside the other person’s ribcage. When that person left, or disappeared, or died, so did that piece of Ronan. If his heart had given him a choice, Hennessy would be the last place he’d leave pieces of his soul lying around.

That did not change the situation. He barely knew her. She’d been cruel and horrible, and he’d been cruel and horrible right back. They were awful for each other. He loved her. He was reasonably sure that he’d love her even if the soul mark didn’t exist, but how would he ever know?

Ronan had ended up loving Gansey just as fast. Faster than he’d come to love Kavinsky, if what they’d had had been love to begin with, which Ronan sometimes doubted. That was how Gansey knew, probably. Recognition of the self. Ancient history.

“Shit fucking sucks,” Ronan said, which was really all there was left to say.

-

It ended up being good that Adam had gone out for drinks, since that gave Ronan time to put himself back together. And process. He took a shower, scrubbed the salt off his face, let the hot water sear his skin. By the time he returned to the living room, Gansey had taken it upon himself to make pancakes. This endeavor had also been far more successful than the earlier egg-trocity.

That was another reason it was good that Gansey was here. Ronan was terrible at remembering to eat when he was trying to sort his mental shit.

Ronan inhaled five of the pancakes in about two minutes, shoving them into his mouth whole rather than bothering with “forks” and “knives” and “decent manners.” Gansey busied himself with cleaning the dishes in the sink as Ronan sat on the living room floor and pondered.

“Parrish is gonna be pissed,” Ronan said.

“Why?” Gansey's voice floated out from the kitchen, pitched loud to be heard over the faucet.

“You know how he is. Irrational heart feelings drive him up the wall.”

“Maybe,” Gansey offered, “he’s concerned for your health and wellbeing.”

“Fuck off. Obviously he’s concerned for my health and wellbeing. He’s just gonna be pissed about it.”

The sink turned off, and Gansey returned to the living room. Ronan wasn’t sure whether he’d finished the dishes or just deemed them less important than the current conversation. “I think,” he said slowly, “we should all get on the same page. Regarding the situation at hand.”

A few years ago, Gansey would rather have jumped off a cliff than face an emotional issue through direct confrontation. It was precisely _because_ of how stupid he’d been that he could mediate conflicts now.

Ronan wrapped his arms around his knees.

“Is there a reason we shouldn’t?” Gansey pressed.

“No,” Ronan said. “I just don’t want to.”

Gansey laughed. He settled down beside Ronan and nudged him gently. “It’ll be okay.”

Ronan wasn’t confident of this, but saying so would mean becoming trapped in an endless loop of reassurances, so he just shrugged and leaned back against Gansey.

He wasn’t sure how he’d even broach the subject, and would probably have let it lie forever, except that Adam made it easy immediately upon his arrival home. As in, Adam hung up his jacket, faced Gansey and Ronan where they’d started watching a shitty movie on the pull-out couch bed, squared his shoulders, and said, “So I lied, like a dick. Hennessy wanted to see me.”

Ronan’s mind skipped through several curious leaps of logic in half a second.

First: Adam did not like Hennessy. This was fact more than conjecture, as sensible a starting place as any.

Second: Adam would not have spent time with Hennessy unless he thought he had to.

Third: If Adam had been out late dealing with her, something had kept him. Which meant something was wrong.

Fourth: If Adam was coming clean now, that meant he had bad news.

Ronan’s body shut down. He wasn’t sure what facial expression he wore, but it had to be cold. Adam eyed them both warily. It was impossible to tell whether Adam would read Ronan’s impending collapse correctly or brace himself for an explosion - Gansey’s quick intervention saved Ronan from needing to find out.

“Is she all right?” Gansey asked.

“She’s fine.” Then, definitely reading Ronan’s expression for what it was, “She’s fine, Ronan. She’s okay. I swear. It’s okay.”

“All right,” Ronan said. His body didn’t want to boot back up as quickly as it had turned off. His ears rang.

“Ronan.” Gansey touched his hand, and Ronan swatted him away.

“Give me two seconds. Jesus. I’m fine.” He pressed his knuckles against his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut. “I’m not gonna be that asshole who needs coddling every two seconds because he can’t keep his shit together. I’m fine. Okay. Okay.” A couple deep breaths, forcing his head to clear the haze through biology-hacking tricks. “I’m fine. What the _hell_ were you thinking?”

“Better me than you,” Adam replied simply. “It was fine. She was fine. We talked some. I got her food, she headed home. Still won’t say where she lives.”

Ronan could wrap his head around almost none of this. “Why,” he started, and had to pause to figure out how to end the question, “are you telling me now?”

“I lied 'cause I didn’t want you to spend the whole night worrying about her. Or me.” Adam rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m gonna see her again, probably. Unless you’re, like, vehemently opposed. But it’s not like it’s your problem.”

“I am vehemently opposed,” Ronan said flatly.

Adam absorbed this. Then, maybe getting tired of facing Ronan like a defendant at a hearing, he kicked his shoes off and clambered into the bed between Ronan and Gansey.

This forced Gansey to scoot over, although he didn’t appear too unhappy about it. “Hey there, tiger,” he said.

“Hey yourself,” Adam replied. He picked up Gansey’s arm and draped it around his shoulders, then laced his fingers with Ronan’s. “Why the vehement opposition?”

Ronan didn’t know how to explain this. It helped that Adam’s tone was neutral, rather than irritated or demanding. It helped that Adam was holding his hand. But a long minute still passed before he spoke, his voice halting and stilted.

“I don’t want,” he started, “for you to - do things - that you don’t want to do. For me. That’s not what I want to be to you.”

Gansey cleared his throat. “I really don’t think that’s what you are. To either of us.”

Adam rubbed his thumb over the back of Ronan’s hand, soft, gentle. “I went to see her for your sake, tonight,” he said. “If I see her again, though, it’s not gonna be about you. She wasn’t awful to be around. She didn’t even ask me for anything I wasn’t willing to give.”

Ronan said, “I don’t know what to do with that.”

“All right. We can let it lie.”

They did, for the rest of the shitty movie. Ronan leaned his head against Gansey’s arm and Adam’s shoulder, his eyes closed, paying zero attention to what was happening on the screen.

As the credits rolled, he mused, “I treated her like fucking shit.”

“So did I,” Adam said. “I think she’ll get over it.”

“I really doubt you came close.”

“I promise you,” Adam said, “whatever you did, I was worse. Let’s not make it a competition. What’re you thinking?”

Ronan probably didn’t want to know whatever had gone down between Adam and Hennessy. Adam could be vicious in very effective ways when he set his mind to it; most likely, that was how he’d gotten Hennessy to pay attention to him in the first place. Equally likely, Ronan would end up nauseous about any details he was privy to.

“I’m tired,” Ronan said, “of giving a fuck about people.”

Gansey made a sound like he found this assessment wanting.

“Keep your mouth shut, Dick,” Ronan added.

Gansey, wisely, did.

Adam took his time formulating his response, or maybe just spent some distracted time dozing before he replied. “I get on all right with her. I can tell her she’s welcome here, if she needs a place to stay. If you want me to, I mean.”

“Is she?” Ronan asked. “Welcome here?”

“You tell me,” Adam said. “If being apart from her isn’t gonna work for you, then I figure we gotta do something different.”

Typical Adam. Wonderful Adam. Putting together problem-solving solutions to save Ronan's skin, even if he disliked the situation himself.

Ronan didn’t know whether Hennessy would ever accept the offer, given that she wanted nothing to do with him, but he said, “Yeah, okay.”

Two days later, she did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is... the probably most intensely personal chapter yet in a fic that's all intensely personal. sexy  
> the good news about sticking through the messiness thus far is that these kids are finally gonna start working their shit out. imagine


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hennessy and ronan both decide they're tired

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> face............ touching......................

Hennessy crashed unintentionally, spectacularly, and pathetically four days into her wakefulness binge.

It was just one more mistake added to the teetering tower of her life’s fuckups. That the structure hadn’t collapsed entirely was the work of chewing gum, stubbornness, and the luck of Ronan Lynch. This mistake didn’t have fatal consequences for anyone involved. Better than some. Worse than others.

The problem was that Hennessy was crazy.

The problem was that Jordan texted.

The problem was that the combination of Jordan’s texts and Hennessy’s crazy meant that she sat in the corner of her studio and stared at the phone screen until the battery drained from “overripe” to “dead husk.” She lost time. She lost enough time that when she realized she was crashing, it was far too late to mitigate the issue.

Another pill would force her brain to stay conscious. But her limbs had become half-dead weight, muscles aching, eyes itching, head stuffed with cotton and fog. The miserable twilight of wakefulness wouldn’t brighten into day. It would just continue, eternally, a northern summer sun that wouldn’t set. Zombie.

 _Come home,_ said the text from Jordan.

 _I’m tired of fighting,_ said the text from Jordan.

 _We can figure it out,_ said the text from Jordan.

Hennessy didn’t know if her sister was lonely or in trouble or just sensing Hennessy’s distress through some bullshit psychic twin connection.

Hennessy _did_ know that she wanted to go home so fucking bad that sometimes the only way to stop herself was to jump in front of a train.

Jordan’s life had been ruined enough.

Jordan had always been the twin with a sense of self and independence and hobbies and friends and hopes and dreams and passions and a future. The one who deserved to live.

Hennessy had always been - well.

Shadow selves were a popular trope in the horror genre. Latched-on parasites in the shape of a person’s skin, leeching and feeding and gnawing, until they became strong enough to tear through throats with their teeth.

The last thing Hennessy had said to Jordan before leaving had been, _Can’t wait to see your obit. I’ll come piss on your_ grave.

Surely Jordan must have done something deserving of the sentiment. Surely both parties were to blame for the falling out. Surely the situation was complex, nuanced, messy.

No. Not particularly. Hennessy had pulled some truly fucked-up unforgivable shit, and then she’d said some truly fucked-up unforgivable shit, and then she’d done some more truly fucked-up unforgivable shit, and then she’d accomplished the only good deed of her entire life by staying away from Jordan for... close to a year, now.

God, how time flew.

Around the same time her phone battery died, she slipped into a half-doze. The clatter of the protective case against the floor jolted her out of it. _Fuck._

What if she _did_ go home? Typical, expected Hennessy, passing out on Jordan’s couch after a typical, expected bender. It was so easy to slip back to the status quo. If Jordan let her back in, all these months of separation would be erased, and it would all be for fucking nothing.

Then there was Adam Parrish’s text from two days ago. _He’s not mad anymore. Neither am I. Apartment’s a safe place to stay_

The choices on the table: Sleep here and wake begging for death. Return to Jordan. Go face her soulmate after everything they’d said and done to each other.

All sucked. Only two were intolerable.

It was tempting to chug a shot of espresso to stay awake on the ride over, but she resisted. By the time she poured herself out of the car, it was hard to see straight. Law-abiding people needed key cards to get in, but Hennessys just needed to wait for postal delivery men. She slipped through the buzzed-open door and into the elevator.

Polite people texted before showing up wasted on someone’s doorstep. Hennessys, on the other hand, didn’t ask permission to take up space. They lounged where they wanted and made others move around them. They ignored boundaries and caution signs and restricted area warnings. They were a separate, more daring species.

Also, she didn’t want to face the rejection of a _now’s not a good time._ In theory, she’d respect that and leave. In practice, it was difficult to exile a pathetic needy idiot in person, and she needed all the leverage she could get.

She knocked. Waited. Barely three seconds later, the door opened. Ronan stood there, his expression unreadable, his eyes locked with hers.

Probably Hennessy was making a huge mistake.

She’d come this far, though.

“I’m tired, Lynch,” she said.

Ronan sighed quietly. Now his face _was_ readable, though she couldn’t glean anything more complicated than bone-deep weariness. 

“Me, too.”

-

Adam took one look at them and said, “I’ll sleep with Gansey on the couch.”

The evening was young enough that he must have just returned from his nine-to-five. He hadn’t taken off his lanyard yet. Since the living room was indeed occupied by the pull-out mattress, Adam had been sitting on a rolling chair with a laptop perched on his thighs. Now, though, he clambered onto the couch bed so there would be room for Hennessy to stand in the small space.

Hennessy had never met a couch mattress that was kind to her back, no matter how expensive or well-reviewed the furniture. But the guys seemed to have mitigated this with at least one foam mattress topper, a million pillows, and a nest of sheets and blankets.

Inside the nest was an unfamiliar entity. “Gansey, I assume,” she said.

He had the rounded, sculpted All-American look only achievable through professional makeup teams or old money. She couldn’t imagine him behind the wheel of a Camaro. A silver dragon crept up his neck, snout nuzzling behind his ear, threaded with fiery reds between the scales. It was indeed the only badass thing about him, and most of it was covered with a hideous polo shirt. God help her.

He studied her with bright, innocent curiosity. No intimidation or apprehension to be found. She should have texted. If she’d known he’d be here, she’d have put on her queen of hell makeup, because first impressions still mattered.

“That’s me,” Gansey said, a little belated.

“Excellent. We must discuss business later.”

“No, there is no ‘must.’” Adam grabbed a small pillow and flung it in her direction. She caught it. Beside her, Ronan frowned; when Hennessy glanced at his face, she could see him doing _what the fuck changed between you two_ calculations.

“What business?” Gansey asked.

“Don’t encourage her,” Adam murmured.

“It’s about my legal entitlement to your Camaro. Perhaps not owning it. I will settle for getting to burn rubber five whole times.”

“The Pig?”

“Is _that_ the chosen name?” She turned it over. “Better be as in, ‘That’ll do, pig.’”

Gansey beamed.

“When exactly did the two of you shoot the shit about Gansey’s ride?” Ronan demanded. Hennessy couldn’t tell whether he was perturbed because Adam had stolen his Camaro-bragging thunder or because Adam had divulged personal details to her.

Adam shrugged.

“I dragged it out of him,” Hennessy said. “Fingers around his throat, gun at his ribs, the whole nine. He begged for his life. Tears were shed.”

“I’ve never actually seen her drive,” Adam said, “but don’t let her drive.”

“Bitch,” Hennessy replied, “I’ve only wrapped a couple cars around trees.”

She expected Gansey to be annoyed by the proceedings, possibly even agitated. She had a fairly good understanding of how conservatively-dressed All-American boys felt about other people touching their shiny cars. 

What she did not expect was for Gansey’s radiant smile to turn up a degree, too genuine to be offputting. “You _are_ like Ronan.”

She needed to decide how to react. It was difficult to imagine _anyone_ pleased by the idea of multiple Ronan Lynches, let alone this Invisalign-LED-teeth-whitening poster child. Probably the poor sod had been brainfucked by the soulmate connection. She reflexively removed a cigarette from her jacket.

“Not in the fucking apartment,” Ronan snapped. “Jesus, I like not having cancer.”

Hennessy shrugged and put the cigarette away.

More mildly, Adam added, “No-smoking lease. Do it on the balcony. I want our deposit back.”

“Just for that, I’m setting your wastebasket aflame.”

When she took a threatening step toward the trash can, though, her knee folded.

She would have collapsed fully if Ronan hadn’t caught her arm. _”Again?”_

“I’m predictable.”

“Have you slept yet?” This from Adam. She didn’t know whether he’d told Ronan or Gansey about her particular habits. But he did take her sneer for what it was. “Go to _bed.”_

“Slumber party,” Ronan muttered. “You got pajamas?”

She did not. Well, she hadn’t packed any. Her sleepwear was all very lacy, very sheer, very itchy, and even less comfortable than leather leggings. “I’m in ‘em.”

“Great.” At least Ronan’s derision was familiar. “Bed, floor, or bathtub. Big fucking range of cozy spots.”

“Bathtubs are an aesthetic, I’ll give you that, but far too mentally associated with drunk guys pissing while I’m trying to sleep. Floors have no glamour value. Bed it is.”

She allowed Ronan to direct her down the short hallway and into the bedroom, which she hadn’t seen yet. It was just as open as the living room and kitchen, one side outfitted with wide windows to capture the rising sun. Various familial photographs and pieces of artwork hung on the walls. A bulletin board and organizational whiteboard had been pinned above a chest of drawers, though by the single cramped handwriting style, she was pretty sure Ronan didn’t use them. Clutter-wise, the space was relatively clean, aside from a corner boasting a hamper. The floor surrounding the hamper had become piled with underwear and old t-shirts from where missed shots had been left to rot.

The bed was large and soft and desperately inviting.

“Am I sticking around?” Ronan asked. “Or cuddling up with the nerdy squares out there?”

It wasn’t until that moment that Hennessy fully registered what Adam had been offering. _I’ll sleep with Gansey._ Leaving the bed free for Hennessy herself - and for Ronan to share, maybe. The setup should have made her bolt. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t want to, especially considering this sounded like the beginning of a murder plot.

Hennessy eyed the vast ocean of bedsheet and said, “Can you sleep? This early?”

“Probably, yeah.” Ronan shoved his hands in his pockets. “Been real mildly manic for a couple days. Gods of sleep like to say _fuck you._ Racked up a deficit.”

Manic since Hennessy had left? She wouldn't have guessed.

“I’d never know it to look at you,” she said. “With my mum, you could always tell. Can’t tell with me ‘cause everything I do is manic.”

“Mild. I’m managing.”

There was a timeline, here, where she could needle him about what exactly _managing_ meant. But that was basically begging a lecture about the merits of managing her own shit, and she was too goddamn tired.

“If you can sleep,” she said, “then stay.”

Ronan exhaled like someone who’d been holding their breath but didn’t want anyone to notice. “Okay.”

When a full minute passed without any further movement, Hennessy said, “I don’t know which side is Parrish’s.”

A pause.

“Lynch? Earth to Lynch, come in please.”

“You gotta give me a minute,” Ronan said, his tone a little odd. “I’m trying to remember how this goes.”

“If you can’t remember which side of the mattress is which,” she replied, “you have some tragic neurological deficits. Get that shit evaluated.”

She’d been continuing to gather data from small details of the room, the way she always did, but now she glanced at Ronan. He was frowning at nothing, an expression of puzzlement rather than anger. A kid taking a test, chewing his pencil, sweating over an answer just on the tip of his tongue.

“Parrish takes the left,” Ronan said finally. He was still frowning. Distracted.

Hennessy set her backpack down beside the designated left side and tossed her denim jacket atop it. “Doing alright there, champ?”

“It’s been a while,” he said, “since I last did this shit.”

“Since you... caught a last-minute caboose to Snoozeville?”

“Since I slept with someone for the first time.”

She laughed. He didn’t. Her mirth did resurrect his irritation, though, his foreign expression shifting into a much more familiar glower. She hadn’t even been trying to annoy him. Thank God she was so hard to tolerate that she hadn’t had to pull any _are you okay_ s or other embarrassing bullshit to get his attention.

“Performance anxiety? It’s _sleep,_ Lynch. The one time you can actually honest-to-God ace the exam by laying there doing nothing. I have legendary standards for certain mattress-related activities, but this is not one of them. Chill.”

Bravado aside, she was glad he was nervous. If she hadn’t glimpsed his uncertainty, her own nerves would be shot. Her general preference was solitary sleep behind locked doors. But there was more to it than that. Hennessy had occasionally nodded off in very public places without more than mild embarrassment - and the people around her tended to end up more embarrassed than she did. Strangers bearing witness to her unconsciousness didn’t bother her. Every averted disaster made for a hilarious anecdote and addition to the legend.

But getting into another person’s bed to sleep - to _sleep,_ not to roll around in the sheets and then sneak out a window - that constituted premeditation. The choice changed things. She was deciding that being vulnerable to another person was better than being protected, even though she _could_ have chosen solitary protection. It was different. It was all fucking different.

So thank fucking God, again, that Ronan Lynch was so easy to make fun of.

She thought about laying in the clean sheets, and that made her aware of how filthy her clothes were. She hadn’t actually changed since the subway platform incident. Rotating outfits became less vital when the days weren’t marked by a circadian rhythm. Pit stains adorned the lace, and the acrid smell of cigarettes clung to the fabric. Probably her skin smelled like smoke, too, but there wasn’t much to do about that.

“Give me something to sleep in,” she said, “or I’m going to slumber in the nude.”

This snapped Ronan out of his half-frozen state. He crossed to the closet and pawed through the hangers, even though everything inside appeared hideously business-casual. Hennessy was unsurprised when his search was unsuccessful. Seeming relieved to have a task, he began rooting through the chest of drawers instead.

“Here,” he said, chucking a black tank and pair of too-long sweatpants at her head. She caught them like she’d caught the pillow earlier. “Sargent hasn’t left any shit lying around lately, I guess. Deal.”

“How chivalrous of you to seek women’s clothes for me,” she said dryly.

“Oh, yeah, I’m obsessed with you being a chick. Didn’t have anything to do with how she’s the only asshole you haven’t met besides Noah. Can’t throw a fucking hissy fit about your bullshit mental implications if you’ve never met the person.”

Hennessy considered pitching a hissy fit now that he’d reminded her that she should, but she couldn’t really summon the energy. She’d asked Ronan for clothes. He’d given her clothes. It would take too much effort to find a sinister undertone.

There _was_ something sweet about the fact that he’d looked for options that wouldn’t make her skin crawl. This seemed like a dangerous sliding slope toward deciding Ronan was an innocent marshmallow, though, so she set the thought aside. Rather than ruminating, she removed the bralet and tugged on the tank.

Ronan turned away with a hand pressed to his eyes, his mouth screwed into a curve best labeled “longsuffering.”

“I refuse to believe you’ve never seen a tit,” she said, peeling off the leggings and wiggling into the sweatpants.

“Warn a guy.”

“Did you know that breasts aren’t even sexual? They’re just fetishized milk glands. These only exist to feed the young. Plenty of men have them, too. Get with the feminist times, Lynch.”

“Oh, my God,” Ronan said. His hand was still pressed to his eyes. “Are you done being naked yet.”

“I’m always naked in spirit. My pixelated bits are all safe, though.”

“Thank fucking Mary for that.” He yanked off his jeans and threw himself onto the mattress with great drama. The image would have made a fantastic photoshoot candid, had he been modeling something more fashionable than off-the-rack Walmart boxers.

Hennessy laid down on Adam’s side more cautiously. When she’d fallen asleep on Ronan after the diner, the tiredness had been a brick to the face. There’d been no reasoning with it, no hesitation. This was different. Her mind was just alert enough to remember that sleep was dangerous.

She faced the bedside table and examined the contents. Adam’s things were sparse, with plenty of untouched surface. Phone charger, lamp, a scattering of stones, a few seashells, a variety of haphazard Post-It notes with incomprehensible reminders. A photo of Ronan and Gansey with a grinning spiky-haired boy and a tiny spiky-haired girl who had to be Ronan’s other soulmates.

“Here,” Ronan said. 

Something wet touched her arm. She startled, flipping over to face him, only to discover the culprit was a basic wipe.

“A... hankie? I’m not weeping.”

“For your face.”

Hennessy leveraged herself up on an elbow so she could peer at the open drawer of Ronan’s bedside table. The wipe did indeed appear to belong to a package designed for makeup. Strange, considering she hadn’t found any makeup-related tools in the bathroom. The idea that Ronan might have bought some on the off chance of her presence... was unsettling.

“Man of hidden depths?”

“Sargent put dollar-store pencil liner on me exactly one time and I could barely see for a week. Deep-seated trauma. Gotta keep these nearby for personal security.”

Hennessy winced, reflexive and entirely genuine. “What did you do to earn such a fate?”

“Developed a tolerance for horseshit.”

“If you put cosmetics around your eyes, they can’t be _dollar store_ products.” This, to Hennessy, was a fundamental founding principle of any lifestyle, regardless of income. “Infections in a tin. Diseases in a pencil.”

“Like I said. Deep-seated trauma.”

“Does she get _all_ her makeup from the dollar store?” This thought was even more unsettling than Ronan having purchased the wipes specifically for Hennessy.

“Probably. I don’t fucking know. She just fucks around with it, man. Hennessy makeup and Blue makeup are two different ballgames.”

“So now the universe is calling me to teach your cute no-romo girlfriend about the marvels of well-designed cosmetics.”

“I can’t believe,” Ronan said, “that I’ve been worrying about you dying of your own horseshit, and in actuality Blue’s gonna shank you for being elitist.”

“And I have to steal Gansey’s car,” she mused. As she scrubbed the wipe over her eyes, it blackened with layers of caked-on liner and mascara. “I suppose I’ll have a calling for Noah too. Any guesses?”

“God, I don’t want to know.”

She rubbed a corner of the wipe over her mouth, staining it ruby and plum. The small amount of remaining white cloth was used to clear highlighter and concealer and foundation. Without a foam cleanser or a mirror, she’d never be able to remove every trace, but her skin immediately felt less like a desert brushfire.

She tossed the filthy wipe over the side of the bed, since she couldn’t be assed to locate the wastebasket or trudge into the bathroom.

Ronan held up another wipe, an eyebrow arched. Hennessy flicked her fingers dismissively. “Don’t need a perfect score. I can dump six more layers of concealer over any impending blotches.”

“Let me,” he said, low and impatient.

A second passed before she understood what he was asking, and her first attempt at a reply came out a croak. Probably that was because her heart had skipped three beats. Panic response, she was almost sure, but an odd one unaccompanied by angry flight reflexes.

“Oh,” she said, eloquent. Or at least, verbal. “Um. Okay.”

 _Idiot._ Ronan’s eyebrow arched higher, but he didn’t use the opening to drag her for filth. Instead, he reached out and pressed the wipe to her cheek.

Since the room was dim with impending dusk, he had to shift closer to see her skin. It was a very strange way for her hands to end up tucked against his chest, a leg hooked around his calf. Ordinarily, the intensity of Ronan’s gaze would demand a fierce answering stare. But he wasn’t using eye contact as a challenge. He’d devoted his full concentration to the task at hand, unforgivably gentle as he smoothed the cloth in little circles. 

She wouldn’t have thought him the methodical type, but he was methodical about this. He spent a few extra seconds being irritated by the stubborn foundation hiding in the corners of her nose, so she stuck her tongue out, which made him snort. From there, he cleared the bridge, her browbone, her forehead. There was a moment where he pushed her hair back with his other hand to clear the blended line of her foundation, his fingers resting against her scalp, and she... reacted.

It was not an erotic sound. She was surprised by the level to which she was _not_ turned on. Some kind of horrifically embarrassing moan would have been better than this, actually, because there was no word that could describe it except a _whimper._

Ronan paused, holding himself so still that she couldn’t even feel his chest rise and fall. But he didn’t jerk away. “Easy,” he said, “easy, hey. Am I hurting you?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t have to touch your hair,” Ronan said. “I mean, technically I do if I want to get all this shit off, but whatever. You can sleep with a lake bed on your face. How the fuck is it even _comfortable?”_

He was so transparently anxious, and trying so hard not to appear transparently anxious, that she had to remind herself he wasn’t a fuzzy puppy. She was smiling, actually. Really smiling, a grin that was impossible to suppress, no vindictive edge to it at all.

She lifted a hand and thunked it on top of his where it rested on her head. “You’re doing fine, Lynch.”

“You know this is a waking nightmare, right? Like, you know no one’s supposed to deal with this until they’re getting painted by the mortician?”

“Oh, please. I know how to apply makeup properly. But I _will_ show you some awful ‘life hacks’ on Youtube later. Top ten ways to _really_ emulate embalming fluid. My application is minimalist by comparison.”

“Why is there so _much?_ ”

She couldn’t tell whether the plaintive note in his voice was genuine or just affected to make her laugh. Either way, she didn’t feel bad about laughing. “I bet I could do an incredible contour on your cheekbones.”

“I _will_ throw you out a window, woman.”

“Or I could get a badly-matched bronzer, turn you orange…”

“If I wanted to be an Oompa-Loompa, I’d let an orange Creamsicle melt on my face.”

He’d relaxed, his ribs moving properly instead of telegraphing shallow panted breaths, which made it easier for her to relax too. “That sounds so sticky.”

“Yup.” If he’d been more like Hennessy, she could have expected some lewd comment about his boyfriends and face licking. Instead, he left it at that, dooming her to eternal mystery.

As silence fell again, she cast around for a new speech to distract from the tension. It was easier when they were shitting around. Silence left her with nothing but Ronan’s hands and the way their touch was gentler, more earnest, more tender than any of Ronan’s words or facial expressions.

It felt a little bit like wanting to be distracted from the pain of a skinned knee or stomach cramp. Which was insane. Hennessy knew that was insane. Nothing happening here was painful or even unpleasant. It was just making her breath do some raspy things. And then, because she failed to beat the physical reaction hourglass, it was making her vocal cords do some wounded animal things.

Ronan’s chest stilled again, but this time for just half a breath. “Look at me,” he said.

She met his eyes. They were steely, unwavering rather than uncertain, but they also said, _Just tell me. Tell me to stop and I will._

“It’s-” she started, and struggled to speak around her strangled throat, “I don’t know - what the hell is happening. I don’t know what this is.”

His fingers lightly scritched at her scalp, though she wasn’t sure whether that was conscious or not. Now there was the tiniest trace of uncertainty, a tightening at the edges of his eyes, _that’s not an answer I don’t know what you want._

She tried to exhale fully, but could only free the air in her upper chest. “If you don’t keep going,” she said, “I won’t find out.”

“You sound like Adam,” he replied, managing to sound both extremely shitty and extremely fond. Rather than elaborating, though, he just returned to the endeavor.

His touch was - bizarre, for so many fucking reasons. Hennessy tried to compile a mental list so that her brainpower wouldn’t be completely devoted to said bizarre touch. For one thing, wipes without foam cleanser tended to require harsh scrubbing, and Ronan was actively avoiding that. It slowed him down, since he had to make ten thousand passes over the same places. When he _did_ find stubborn bits of dried-on concealer, he used the tiniest pressure point possible as he combated it. Like he didn’t want to abrade any unnecessary skin. Like for him, this was _about_ the chance to be gentle and not about the makeup at all -

She made it this far into the thought process before she started crying.

 _Obviously_ she’d been doomed to cry. It was clear now that that was what the physical warning signs were building to. Pressure in her chest, clogging in her throat, trouble drawing breath. She should have been horrified. But the truth was, at least for the first minute or two, the tears felt so fucking _good_ that she couldn’t even muster snide mental commentary about them.

She expected Ronan to freeze back up, maybe bolt. Certainly that was her own reaction when anyone started sobbing in bed under any circumstances. But he just began petting her hair, careful, continuing what he was doing. His face was blurred through the film of tears, but the vague shape of his eyebrows seemed - relieved.

He didn’t speed up, either, another way in which he was different from Hennessy. Hennessy, when confronted with unexpected maudlin outbursts, fast-forwarded every interaction until she could escape. Ronan, on the other hand, did not appear to have lost interest in gentleness just because she was snotting on him.

She really didn’t know what to do with any of it. And she was far too tired and emotionally fried to pull her shit together, so she just knotted up her fingers in his shirt and cried for a little while. When Ronan finished stripping the blended foundation at her jawline, turning her face carefully from side to side, she buried her face in his neck and cried some more.

He must have chucked his wipe away to join hers on the floor, because he didn’t get up. He just hugged her close, one arm anchored around her waist, the other still stroking her hair. Hennessy was used to needing to fill silence with entertainment, but when Ronan didn’t speak, it felt like a conversation anyway. He was just letting his body do the talking instead.

Hennessy half-expected to cry herself to sleep, but after maybe ten minutes, she found herself to be a very conscious and very wrung-out dishrag. She breathed against Ronan’s collarbone. Honestly, she wasn’t sure she felt _better,_ but she sure did feel less out-of-control.

She was beginning to think she might have been a little touch-starved.

It hadn’t occurred to her that touch starvation was possible for a person who so regularly touched so many bodies.

She didn’t expect Ronan to speak again, and she’d slipped into a doze when he finally murmured, “You dumbass, crazy shithead.”

Everything felt weird. There was room to snark now, though, and she snatched at the sarcasm like a starving orphan presented with sustenance. “This is an excessively heavy-handed metaphor for vulnerability,” she informed him, “and I’m finding it very obnoxious.”

“I break out in hives around metaphors. And English classrooms.”

“This is a sad artsy indie film where the makeup is the shield of my womanhood and now I’m _exposing_ my _naked self_ for the voyeuristic audience. My performance is impeccable. The characterization leaves something to be desired. Who wants to watch beautiful women weep and accomplish nothing for a half hour? Oh, God, there’s a French white man directing me.”

If she’d offered this thesis to Adam, she thought, he’d have nitpicked the use of _French_ as the first adjective, and she’d have said, _The Frenchness manages to outperform the whiteness in terms of how terrible the man is._ Fuck _the French._

Ronan just pulled back slightly, until she scooted up to meet his eyes. “Is it literally gonna kill you to be sincere for two seconds?”

“You were thinking it too. Checking your proverbial watch all, ‘God in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name, when will this be over, I’m begging you.’”

“No,” Ronan said, “I wasn’t.”

That took the wind out of her sails. It was difficult to start an argument with him when he refused to rise to the bait. He’d be an excellent witness for the defense in a murder trial, she thought.

She couldn’t really pull her shell back on when he had her snot and spit and tears on his tank top anyway. He’d seen something that no one else ever had - something she hadn’t known was inside her at all.

He laid his hand against her cheek. There was no excuse for it, now, but she kind of thought they might be past the need for excuses. “Why are you so fucked up?” he asked.

Where could she ever begin? “Why are _you_ so fucked up?”

She half-expected a blunt answer, some pared-down bare-bones trauma summary, a dare to match his heart-on-sleeve open-honesty propaganda. But he just rolled his eyes and said, “What helps you sleep?”

"Nothing."

Ronan’s eyes narrowed. _Try harder._

She truly didn’t know what to offer. Her physical safety was always her main priority. Peaceful sleep was a lost cause regardless of the bedtime routine, self-soothing, white noise, music, ten thousand other therapies. She’d found one surefire cure in a hefty dose of Xanax or Valium, but she took those drugs once in a blue moon. Only when feral desperation set in. They weren’t like the stimulants - nights of true rest levered a temptation that would ruin her. If she let herself chase dreamless sleep down the rabbit hole, she was positive she’d never see the sun again.

So drugs were not an option. She was as physically safe as she was going to get. As secure as she was going to get. She would have the nightmares anyway.

“Don’t let me go,” Hennessy said.

Ronan slipped his hand from her face to her back. Hugging her tight would mean dooming one arm to a night of pins and needles, so Hennessy didn’t mind that he didn’t try. Instead, he used his free hand to brush her hair back, again and again, soothing her even though she'd spent her tears.

“I’m trying to be mad that you’re petting me like an anxious kitten,” she said, “but unfortunately, it’s nice.”

“More like an anxious calf,” he said, helpfully.

“Are you calling me a _cow?”_

“I’m saying I know more about petting cows than petting cats. But, I mean. Let’s not discount how fucking funny it would be if I was just ribbing you.”

“Small town boy?”

“One better. Rural farm boy.”

“Bullshit. There’s no way.”

“I’m multidimensional.”

Really, considering how intimate the shit they’d just shared was, it was hard to wrap her mind around the fact that she was still learning about him. They still knew nearly fucking nothing about each other. They just... fit.

That disconcerted her. This was how soulmates were meant to be, sure. If the world worked the way the romantics thought, there’d be no whiplash waiting. But Hennessy knew there had to be another shoe poised to drop. Nothing was ever this easy, especially not for someone like her.

“I’ve got zero dimensions,” she said. “I’m a terrifying void in the space-time continuum.”

“Sounds about right. Terrifying voids need sleep, too. Shush.”

It was the first time in a long time that she could examine both her body and her mind and think, _I like what is happening here. I like what I am feeling. I would like to keep doing it._

The price would just be freedom, adventure, some measure of autonomy. A carving out of all the pieces that made her _Hennessy_ so she could dissolve into a larger entity. The concept made her so lonely and sad that she felt like she’d melt straight through the floor; so fucking much for the two seconds of peace in Ronan’s arms.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, though, if she could spend most of her time held like this. And also banish thoughts of what she’d lost. Nothing could hurt you if you didn’t think about it.

She wasn’t sure Ronan was still awake, but she whispered, “What would it be like?"

"Mm?"

"Surrendering.”

“Go to sleep.”

“I might, if I get to have this. Terribly problematic desire, I know. Turn the autonomy into a transaction, act like I had a say. Look at me. Someone else ought to be in charge of my life, I’m clearly doing fuckall with it myself.”

“Hennessy.” Ronan’s voice was quiet, no trace of his usual irritability. “I’m not touching this until you’ve slept.”

“Do you think it could ever be good?” she pressed. “I could just... stop. All of this, being who I am. Just stop. People reinvent themselves all the time. You cuddle me, I have the occasional banter with your boy toy, I do what you want, everybody wins.”

_“Hennessy.”_

“No, you’re right, of course,” she mused. Even now, she was souring things, her chronic inability to function ruining all of the kindness he’d shown. “I’d never manage. Too antithetical. Shouldn’t make promises I won’t keep. One of us would be dead within the week.”

He didn’t respond to this, possibly because she’d reached slurred incoherence levels of exhaustion, possibly because he was fed up with the bullshit, possibly because he was asleep. 

She shifted slightly, taking hold of the arm draped over her. Her fingertips skimmed until she found the leather wristbands and then his hand. She lifted it, placing his palm against her throat, her fingers curled over his.

“I still have room to give you a flower,” she said. “My war crimes.”

Ronan opened his eyes, unimpressed. “I don’t fit your MO.”

“I can tweak a few parameters.”

His annoyed grunt was a succinct non-word for _I really don’t need to rehash this part of your history._ She kept his hand pressed to her skin, though. From this position, his thumb could crush her windpipe to dust, if Ronan decided that was what he wanted.

“I think, of everyone who’s tried,” she said, “you’re the only one I’d let kill me.”

_“Jesus.”_

That was all alarm, startled rather than angry. She hadn’t actually been aiming to shock him. Sometimes when she got tired enough, the filter between her mouth and brain thinned. Sometimes she didn’t remember later what she’d said. Hopefully Ronan would let her disavow all of this post-sleep without extrapolating meaning from it.

“Let’s just pretend, for a minute, that I’d ever let you control me. Just until I’m asleep. I don’t know how to sleep if I’m doing it myself.”

“Well, I’m not knocking you out.”

“Tell me what you’d want me to do. If you were in charge.”

Ronan’s mouth thinned. His face was shadowed, backlit by the darkening evening sky. There was a lot written on his face, although Hennessy didn’t know how much he meant to share. _This is fucked up and you’re fucked up and I don’t know what the hell this means and I feel like I’ve inflicted enough psychological damage so-_

He was going to say no. That was fair. She probably could sleep without it - if she’d tired herself out enough not to be upset about the _no,_ she was coma-level knackered.

Then he appeared to decide that indulging her bullshit was a better bet. “In my most ideal world, here, you _shut the hell up_ until you’ve _slept.”_

That was a fair call. She mimed zipping her lips and throwing away the key.

“And I’d want you to close your eyes and breathe and let yourself sleep instead of fucking fighting it.”

Less easy, but inevitable. She might be the queen of stalling, but she hadn’t yet found a way to cheat time entirely.

“And then I’d want you to wake me if I'm passed out through your shit dreams.”

Hennessy could not imagine doing this. The idea of shaking someone awake and crying on them about her sad feelings - it was the kind of shit she’d have done to Jordan when they were kids. She was a grown-ass adult now. She’d been carrying this alone for so long. She couldn’t start reaching out, because if she did, she’d chase the comfort down the exact same rabbit hole that beckoned when she took Xanax.

But God, God, God, a not-inconsiderable part of her wanted it.

Ronan had no idea what he was getting into.

“They can hurt you, but they can’t kill you,” Ronan said. At her perplexed frown, he added, “The nightmares. They’ll just tell you to kill yourself instead. Fuck around in your head, pretend the idea was all yours. _Wake me the hell up.”_

She was abiding by the no-talking clause, so she brushed her fingers against his cheek, a far more tender touch than she afforded anybody else, and then she closed her eyes.

They both truly were fucked up, she mused, and that was the last coherent thought she had before sleep finally claimed her.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> adam and gansey discuss soulmates and the future

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter has kicked my ass for six straight weeks. i've rewritten it twice, have a google doc full of outtakes, and have spent god only knows how many hours editing. but finally it's up o/

In the other room, Adam and Gansey ordered a nutritionally balanced dinner of deep-fried pizza, since most usable ingredients had been sacrificed to the pancake batter earlier, and Adam didn’t want to go grocery shopping.

While waiting for food to arrive, they chatted about the inane - everything that hadn’t come up over the past few days. Blue and Henry’s classes, the stray cat outside Gansey’s apartment, whether either of them thought that new biopic on that long-dead president was any good.

It was a careful dance: sincere, but waltzing around the elephant in the bedroom.

Gansey gave in first. He usually did, these days. Adam didn’t share Gansey’s need to quantify everything in words, which meant that if Gansey thought a subject needed discussion, it fell to Gansey to bring it up.

“Can we… talk about it?” Gansey asked, between mouthfuls of his third slice of pizza.

The problem was that Adam sometimes avoided talking about things because he was a reticent bastard, not because it hadn’t occurred to him to discuss them. The other problem was that he thought, _Gansey waited until we were eating to make it a casual conversation,_ and the idea of the discussion being _scripted_ as though Adam needed to be _handled_ -

That wasn’t fair. That was Adam’s prickly side rearing up; he knew Gansey didn’t have ill intentions.

“What’s there to talk about?” he asked coolly.

Stupid. Obviously there was a lot to talk about, even without factoring in feelings and relationship complications. Adam had avoided the topic of Hennessy with Gansey because he didn’t know _how_ to talk about it. He didn’t know what he ought to share, what he ought to keep hidden, what he ought to lie about.

If he’d been thinking straight, he’d have gone with something like, _Sure. It’s weird for you, right?_ Turned the question on Gansey, gotten him talking, placed himself as a curious third-party spectator.

Gansey studied Adam for a long moment. Adam studied him right back.

“It’s been quiet for a while,” Gansey said, inclining his head toward the hallway.

“Yeah.”

“I know they’re not,” Gansey added, as Adam boxed up the remaining pizza, “but what if they’re dead.”

Adam bristled slightly - just like Gansey to make some dire proclamation so the rest of the conversation paled by comparison. _They aren’t dead, so there’s clearly nowhere to go but up._ But when he looked up from the box, he found genuine worry in the pinched corners of Gansey’s eyes. Faking worry about something so asinine didn’t make any sense. More likely, Gansey’s brain had latched onto an awful thought and refused to let go.

Adam could relate to that.

“They’re not dead,” Adam said.

“I know.”

Adam put the pizza box in the barren fridge. When he returned to the couch nest, Gansey was doing an excellent job of pretending that he wasn’t thrumming with anxiety. 

The third time Gansey’s eyes darted to the hallway, Adam sighed. “I’ll check.”

Gansey could check himself. That he was trying not to meant - that he was working on his neuroses, or going through a new mental health guidebook, or trying to prove something to himself. Adam couldn’t quite reconcile leaving him to it. For one, he disliked it when Gansey felt bad because he loved Gansey; for another, Gansey’s anxiety was contagious, and Adam would eventually end up needing to check on Ronan and Hennessy for his own sake anyway.

“Sorry,” Gansey said.

Adam waved him off.

As expected, when he soundlessly turned the knob and pushed the door open, he was not greeted by a bloodbath. No corpses splayed across the mattress. There weren’t even any severed body parts.

Instead, he found Ronan and Hennessy curled up tightly, the quilt tugged up to their shoulders. Hennessy faced the wall, her back fitting snug against the curve of Ronan’s chest. Ronan had freed one arm and draped it over Hennessy’s blanketed side. Both parties were deeply, soundly asleep - or at least, Ronan was. Adam had no idea how to tell whether Hennessy was faking.

A pang shot through his chest. He searched himself, careful, and was surprised not to find any accompanying bitterness. Not jealousy, then. He wasn’t sure what else one was supposed to feel in these situations.

He closed the door just as carefully as he’d opened it, holding the knob to prevent a click, and then he returned to Gansey.

“Asleep. Very alive.”

Gansey nodded brusquely. He smiled, like he’d been joking, but Adam didn’t miss the flash of true relief in his eyes. “Thank you.”

Adam shrugged. “Did it for me. Wouldn’t put it past them to kill each other.”

Gansey drew the covers back so that Adam could settle into the nest. Adam laid his head on Gansey’s pillow rather than his own, no doubt bringing a reek of unshowered laboratory ooze with him, but Gansey didn’t seem to mind.

“That,” Gansey said, “seems like something to talk about.”

“Oh, they’re not actually gonna kill each other. I don’t think.” Adam regretted saying it aloud immediately, because he disliked admitting he had doubts. “It’s just, y’know, new.”

“‘New,’” Gansey echoed.

‘New’ implied there would come a time when things were no longer new. It implied a future. Adam didn’t have trouble acknowledging this - he’d known Hennessy would have a permanent impact on their lives before Ronan had. Explaining this to Gansey, though, when Gansey had only heard Ronan’s side of the story - and it occurred then to Adam that he didn’t actually know _what_ Ronan had said.

“Yeah. New.”

Gansey laid down, rolling onto his side to face Adam, their faces perilously close together. “You think it’s going to… settle, then? It’s just the newness making things rough?”

That was not the kind of question Adam wanted to answer. “There’s… an adjustment period,” Adam said, “for everyone.”

“An adjustment period.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not sure adjusting to Noah or Blue was ever this tumultuous.” Gansey considered. “Or even adjusting to Henry, the rabid jealousy from both of you notwithstanding.”

“I was not _jealous,”_ Adam protested, a resurrection of a long-dead argument. “Shut up.”

Gansey laughed. That was a relief, at least, that smile around his eyes. “Do you really think it’s going to be all right?”

“I-” Adam didn’t want to lie, but he also didn’t want to make Gansey’s worry lines reappear. “I don’t even know how versed you are in, uh, the saga.”

“She’s his last soulmate, she’s suicidal, they fought. You like her, apparently. He’s scared. I know that isn’t much to go on. You may have noticed that Ronan is not particularly verbose.”

“His best quality.”

Gansey closed his eyes. “He scared the hell out of me when he called.”

Adam winced. Ronan had sounded _fine_ by the time he’d come back inside, especially considering the circumstances. “How bad?”

“Enough to be concerned.”

Adam didn’t press. The frosty non-answer wasn’t a sign of irritation. It was a clear signal not to push, Gansey’s way of saying that he wanted to keep the conversation private. That was okay. It might have smarted once upon a time, but Adam valued his own privacy highly enough to recognize the hypocrisy in disliking Gansey’s.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Adam said. “You handle him better than I do.”

Gansey’s mouth thinned. Adam supposed the sentiment was selfish, or callous, as if he only valued Gansey’s company for the burdens Gansey alleviated. But he wasn’t sorry. It was true. Gansey and Ronan had something between them that Adam had never been able to compete with, even when he’d tried. Maybe because they’d been each other’s first. Maybe because they were best friends. Maybe because of their commitment. It didn’t matter.

“The thing is,” Gansey said, careful, “we’re not kids anymore.”

“I know.”

“And I would like to avoid foolish adolescent mistakes, since we don’t have the excuse of being adolescents.”

This sounded like it was leading up to Something. “I know,” Adam repeated, more cautiously.

“And I love you so much, but I don’t know how we’re going to be pragmatic if you decide that you’re above all of this.”

Adam blinked. And blinked again.

“That was harsh.” Gansey touched Adam’s cheekbone, gentle. Adam turned into the caress rather than recoiling, a silent way of letting Gansey know he was more nonplussed than hurt. “I don’t mean to say I think that’s what you’re doing. I’m trying to address scenarios I’m worried about.”

“Like how you addressed the scenario of Ronan and Hennessy both being dead fifty feet away.”

“Technically, _you_ addressed that one. Because I was being ridiculous.”

“Oh, but this isn’t ridiculous?”

Gansey just looked at Adam. It was a testament to Gansey’s patience, maybe, that he didn’t begin reciting the laundry list of past transgressions. Or maybe Gansey just knew that Adam’s brain would be more thorough and pointed than Gansey himself ever could be.

Adam had not always been… kind, where soulmates were concerned.

“Okay,” Adam said. “I don’t think I’m doing that, and I’m a little pissed that you don’t think better of me. But I’m aware of my track record. So. Tell me what you’re worried about.”

Gansey’s mouth quirked, somewhere between rueful and genuinely amused. “That was very diplomatic, Parrish.”

“‘State your perspective, state your emotions using ‘I’ words, empathize with the other party, open the floor to communication.’ Whoever said you can’t learn social skills out of books didn’t try hard enough. I’m reacting so well, Gansey. I’m reacting so well even though I want to shove you out of the bed. Please reward me for my mental efforts.”

“I love you,” Gansey said.

Adam’s ears warmed slightly. “That’s not a reward. I need something better if we’re going to Pavlov me into emotional maturity.”

“It was an observation.” Gansey’s facial expression was one he’d most definitely learned from Blue. “I figured if I started out harsh, things couldn’t escalate.”

“So you just let me believe you’ve been sitting on ‘Adam Is A Bastard Who Ruins Everything’ for your whole trip?”

“Is _that_ how it came across?” Gansey asked, aghast. “Oh, no. No, of course not.”

“Oh, God, please don’t reassure me. I’m literally fine.”

“It wasn’t-”

_“Literally fine.”_

“All right, all right.” Gansey removed his hand from Adam’s face for the sake of touching his own lower lip. “I’m trying to decide how to phrase it.”

“I’m not helping you, just so you know,” Adam said. “I could. I get where you’re coming from. I’m withholding my book-learned empathy so I can say I had no part in digging the hole. This is all you, love.”

‘Love’ was possibly unfair, given that it was a pet name boasting a one hundred percent conversion rate of Ganseys into puddles of mush. Adam had no innate fondness for pet names, but he was very fond of anything that could make Gansey flush. (The same pet name with Ronan was generally a sign that Ronan was in deep trouble.)

“That seems rude,” Gansey said. “You didn’t respond to gentler approaches!”

“Because I don’t want to talk about it!”

“Well!” Gansey scooted back so he could make an expansive gesture with his hands, although the effect was slightly diminished when Adam had to grab his hand so he wouldn’t pitch onto the floor.

After Gansey had stabilized, Adam released him. “Fine,” Adam said, “we’re both stupid. Happy? Now tell me what you’re worried about.”

Gansey had no right to look as pleased as he did about both of them being declared the stupid one in the argument. Adam wasn’t sure it had been an argument to begin with. He was having a difficult time holding onto his annoyance, which was slightly annoying in itself.

When Gansey did speak, it was with the measured tones of someone who had also read several in-depth conflict resolution guides on the internet. “I know you find soulmate relationships somewhat regressive-” 

“I what?”

“-and I’m not sure now is the best time to be… modern.”

“Wow,” Adam said. _“That’s_ the least offensive phrasing you came up with?”

Gansey pulled a pillow over his face.

“You’re really bad at this,” Adam told him, with great affection.

Gansey mumbled something into the pillow.

“Still deaf, Gansey.”

Gansey removed the pillow from his face. “I know I’m really bad at this. I would like to not be doing it. Can you please work with me instead of marinating in my suffering.”

“I’m kinda having fun.”

Gansey sat up and lovingly bestowed his new pillow friend upon Adam via solid swat. “I _know._ I am honest to God trying to have a serious conversation, though.”

It occurred to Adam that continuing the banter would be deflecting the serious topic exactly how Hennessy did, and God knew that one of his biggest personal selling points was _not_ being like her, so he sighed and said, “Okay. So you think I’m gonna be a dick.”

“I think it is a possibility.”

Adam was pretty sure he’d already been a dick in the exact way Gansey feared, but he was also pretty sure he hadn’t had enough time to act out every single terrible scenario Gansey had envisioned.

“And I need to be sensitive to the fact that Ronan’s having a bunch of irrational feelings and idiotic impulses that I cannot possibly empathize with.”

“Adam.”

“I literally can’t come up with a way to say that non-sarcastically.”

Gansey’s mouth tugged down slightly at the corners. “Not sensitive about his impulses. Sensitive about him _hurting.”_

_That_ stung. “I am.”

“Okay.” Gansey’s exhale was a tell. He’d been prepared to argue, or wanted to argue. “Good. Then we’re all on the same page and can figure out how to address the current situation.”

“Do you really think I don’t know that he’s hurting?” Adam could bury the sting somewhere under his ribs and move on to practicalities, but when it came to Gansey, wounds had a habit of festering. He wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it for weeks if he didn’t bring it into the open now.

“I don’t know,” Gansey said. “All I have to draw on are data points from six or seven years ago.”

“And the fact that you _know_ me.”

Gansey’s expression politely said, _Yes, that is a pleasing sentiment that I enjoy and which also means absolutely nothing in practical terms._

“I know you’re not who you were six years ago. How can you think I’m the same?”

“I can’t just _intuit_ every way your feelings and opinions have changed, Adam.”

“Why would you even want to be with me if you think I’m still such a dickish and appalling-”

“Stop. Adam. Stop. Stop.”

Adam bit down on his tongue. Gansey rarely cut him off, and when he did, it was usually when Adam was saying something he’d regret later. This felt no different. If Adam let words spill out of him, uncontrolled, there was no telling what kind of damage he’d do.

“Adam.” Gansey cupped Adam’s cheek again, gentle, brushing a stray curl of hair back. “Please.”

“You said yourself we aren’t kids anymore.”

“We aren’t. But Adam, I’m not _in your head._ I don’t know which behaviors you think are dickish and appalling. I, for one, have never found your actions to be appalling, so I am a little mystified by this reaction.”

Adam closed his eyes. “I care more about Ronan now than I did back then.”

“I know.”

“That makes a difference.”

“Okay.”

“This isn’t casual for me.” Adam was irritated to find the upset leaking into his voice, clogging his throat, threatening to crack. “Do you think it’s casual for me?”

“No. Jesus, no. Not at all.”

“I’ve worked so _fucking_ hard, Gansey.”

“I know.”

“No. You don’t. Learning you, learning him, learning Noah, learning Blue, even learning Henry - you _don’t_ know. I don’t _have_ your baseline. I’m making up the playbook as I go. You don’t know how hard I’ve worked. I’m in this. I don’t want to screw it up. I’m gonna be more inclined to follow your guidance on how not to screw up if you don’t treat me like some - some -”

Gansey’s mouth opened, shaping the first syllable of Adam’s name, but then he paused and nodded for Adam to finish.

“Like some interloper who’s gonna prove he doesn’t belong in the worst way possible.”

Surprise and pain flashed across Gansey’s face. Adam already knew he hadn’t meant it like that, not consciously at least, but it wouldn’t have shocked him if Gansey tried to prove it. Lack of intention ought to count as innocence, according to the Gansey school of thought. But instead, to Adam's surprise, Gansey stayed quiet. Unpleasantly, he realized that this was a change in Gansey that he’d been unaware of, the same way Gansey was apparently unaware of Adam’s own growth.

When enough time had passed that Adam’s ragged breathing had eased, Gansey murmured, “That wasn’t even on my radar.”

“Consciously.”

“Or subconsciously.”

Adam snorted.

“Do you think _I’m_ not serious about this?” The pain in Gansey’s face was transforming into more easily recognizable hurt. Adam longed to name it self-pity, except that it was a mirror of his own upset. “After all this time?”

“I don’t even know what we’re fighting about anymore.”

“Are we fighting?”

“Feels like we’re fighting.”

“I adore you,” Gansey said. Adam was about to point out that that didn’t mean they couldn’t fight, but he added, “We _both_ worked for what we have. You might have worked harder, I’m not discounting that. But I fully intend for you to be part of my life for as long as you want to be part of it.”

“So I’m gonna up and run.”

“I hope not.”

Adam didn’t know how to respond. He couldn’t quite reason through whether his own hurt was rational, let alone whether he thought Gansey was full of bullshit.

“So,” he said finally, “Ronan hurting.”

Gansey exhaled. “Ronan hurting,” he repeated, clearly just as relieved as Adam to tread back to safer ground.

“What do we do?”

“I think that depends a lot,” Gansey said, “on Hennessy.”

“You mean it depends a lot on whether history’s gonna repeat.”

Gansey frowned, as though he found this phrasing distasteful, but he didn’t disagree.

“So if history’s gonna repeat,” Adam said, “then what do we do?”

“I think that depends on which parts of the history we’re talking about.”

“You were closer to it than I was, Gansey.”

The quiet stretched between them.

"Do you ever have a thought," Gansey started, "that's so horrible" - here he paused, as if deciding whether to finish - "that you can't ever say it?"

Thoughts meeting that description made up at least thirty percent of Adam's headspace on a _good_ day. He hedged, cautiously, "And then you end up wanting to say them 'cause it's dark and you can't see the other person's face in the blanket nest?"

Gansey exhaled. "Something like that."

"Tell me." At Gansey's silence, Adam hooked an arm around his waist and added, "I like it when you're not perfect. Makes me feel like less of a monster."

"You're not a monster," Gansey said, reflexive.

Adam snorted.

Gansey didn't apologize, but he didn't press the point, which was as decent a gesture as any. He was quiet for a few more seconds, his stomach moving as he breathed. Then he stretched out with a long exhale. Adam tucked his head against Gansey's shoulder to fulfill the no-face-viewing promise.

"When he died," Gansey said finally, "Jesus, I - Jesus Christ. I should have been horrified. Upset. I at _least_ should have been concerned for Ronan. I should have been planning how to help with the grief. Calling him. Making sure he was safe. All of that should have been the first thing on my mind."

"It wasn't?"

"It was the second."

Adam knew how this worked - how it felt. The ugly reaction, followed by the morally acceptable cover-up. Some people would say that the second thought mattered most because it was controlled and therefore belied a person's true priorities. Some people would say that the first reaction was the only true one, and everything afterward was a pathetic attempt to reconcile it.

He hadn't known that Gansey understood this kind of ugliness, too.

"What was the first thought?" Adam asked.

Gansey's silence was much longer this time, but Adam didn't press. He knew how it felt to be pushed to share, like he knew how it felt to weather an ugly reaction, and he didn't want to scare Gansey off.

When Gansey did speak, his voice came out a whisper, more like his throat was clogged than like he was controlling the volume on purpose. Adam angled his hearing ear closer to catch it. "Please don't ever tell him."

"I won't."

"It's not - it's not a secret I'm keeping. I'm not being a dick." A pause. "Am I?"

"Why don't you want me to tell him?"

"He'll feel like shit."

Adam wasn't watching Gansey's mouth, but he could picture the puckered downturned fighting-for-neutrality expression easily enough - he'd studied Gansey's mouth thoroughly enough to dream about it.

"And I don't want him to think differently of me." Gansey chuckled, mirthless. "Selfish."

Adam pushed Gansey's shirt up, tracing his fingertips over the curve of a rib. "You don't want him to think you were being horrible when he was having the shittiest time of his life. Not sure where that falls on the selfishness scale. But either way, I won't. Tell him, I mean. I don't mess with you two."

"You do sometimes..."

Gansey trailed off without finishing.

There had been a time when this edge of accusation would have incensed Adam. _Holier-than-thou Gansey riding in on his white horse to save all the lowly people with their savage, unholy thoughts._

It had been a long while since Adam had felt that bite, though. There hadn't been bitterness between them for ages - nowadays, when Gansey used accusatory language, it meant he'd relaxed enough to muse without carefully considering his words. He wasn't aiming to wound so much as thinking aloud.

Adam abandoned his trace of Gansey's ribs and pressed his arm to Gansey's stomach instead - _oof,_ said Gansey - so he could leverage himself up. Gansey's face _was_ shadowed in this light, but not impossible to make out. Which was how Adam knew Gansey would see the shape of his grin, batlike blindness notwithstanding.

"I do sometimes what?"

He wouldn't let this go until he had an answer. He could be very persistent. He knew that Gansey knew he could be very persistent.

Gansey squinted at him. "You do sometimes," he said, "shitstir."

Adam laughed with surprise, loud enough to make both of them jump. He clapped a hand over his own mouth. Between his fingers, he whispered, "I won't shitstir about this."

The moment might have been broken either way. Adam's laughter had sheared through the tension, the threads that wrapped them tight, the spellwork that begged secrets to spill under cover of darkness. 

But maybe the levity had made Gansey brave, because he took a breath and murmured, "The first thought was, 'Thank God Ronan can't change his mind now.'"

Adam's stomach clenched.

"And then, of course," Gansey added, "I thought, 'Oh, God, _Ronan.'"_

"Of course."

"I don't really feel any better having said it out loud. I thought I might. I don't."

"I do." Adam laid back down, removing his arms from Gansey so he could rest on his back and study the darkened ceiling. He hooked a leg around Gansey's, though, a soft reassurance, _I'm not upset nothing's ruined I don't think you're a monster._

"Well. I'm glad I could improve your night."

"It's not that bad, as thoughts go," Adam said. "I mean, it's factually correct. No fractured logic. No irrational emotion. No harm wished other than what was already done. You were just glad Ronan lost one of many avenues for being stupid."

"Adam," Gansey said, "I love you so much. This is not helping at all."

"You've been glad Ronan can't be stupid plenty of times. What about when they rescheduled that monster truck rally so it didn't coincide with the six-beers-for-six-dollars-if-you-drink-'em-all special? Harboring any deep guilt about that?"

"Oh my God." Gansey covered his face with his hands. "Don't make light of this. If I laugh, I'll throw up."

"All right, all right." Adam wriggled one arm until it was tucked underneath Gansey's shoulders, a renewed reassurance that didn't require him to shift positions. "It is, arguably, slightly, mildly, infinitesimally callous."

"Yes, 'callous' is a good descriptor. The adverbs feel unearned."

"So you had one callous thought, once, that you never acted on. Big deal. If you saw what goes on in my head, Gansey - it's a shitshow in here. No one's pure of heart or mind or soul or whatever. You're fine."

They lapsed back into silence. Adam took the lack of argument to mean that he'd won. That was nice. He tended to win only about half the arguments with Gansey, which was a significantly lower percentage than with most other people. Possibly this was because Adam engaged in too many stupid arguments with Gansey, or possibly because Gansey didn’t fight with Adam unless he had a legitimate leg to stand on.

"I tried very hard," Gansey said, "to be sad that he was dead."

"A skill that the great Gansey himself couldn't acquire? I'm floored."

"I tried very hard," Gansey said, _"not_ to be _happy_ that he was dead."

Adam himself had been plenty pleased by Joseph Kavinsky’s demise, although he’d had just enough care not to show it. He’d been cruel about the entire situation in ways that made him wince to remember: Ronan desperately trying to make things work with both Gansey and Kavinsky, Gansey desperately trying to extend an olive branch to keep Ronan from disappearing down a bottomless hole, Kavinsky interested in nothing but who and what he could use to outrun his own demons.

Adam hadn’t wanted to touch it. Had refused to touch it, for the most part. When he was being charitable toward his past self, he remembered that he hadn’t had _room_. Those days had all been marked by pain and fatigue and fear and struggle and spite. Adam had been selfish, yes, but in the manner of a species that had to protect itself from predators at all costs. There had been no energy left to care for other people.

And the anger. Endless anger. Adam could remember the way it snarled in his chest and tangled around his throat. Fury at Gansey for giving Ronan too many second chances, fury at Ronan for refusing to see that his soulmate was a piece of shit, fury at the universe for concocting such a miserable scenario. He couldn’t remember whether he’d been angry at Kavinsky. Kavinsky had been nothing to Adam, an obnoxious drug-dealing party boy who represented all the things Adam hated most, a formulaic constant of the whole godforsaken world.

_I’m sorry you’ve got a socially-induced savior complex._ Adam closed his eyes. Those were the words of someone younger, colder, harsher. Someone who’d never quite figured out how to turn their anger into kindness instead.

“So if it were up to you," Adam said, "you’d rather Hennessy had nothing to do with him."

“Not necessarily.” When Adam opened his eyes, Gansey was watching him intently. “I’d like to offer her support. Try to help. She seems reasonably inclined toward friendship. But if she rejects the offer…”

Adam finished the sentence for him. “Ronan comes first.”

“Ronan comes first,” Gansey agreed.

Adam hadn’t expected to find himself so thoroughly aligned with Gansey. Gansey tended toward the noble and the moral, in Adam’s opinion. He cared about people the same way Ronan did, because he believed they had intrinsic worth. He also made far more of an effort to show that than Ronan did.

Adam supposed the Kavinsky thing must have left scars on Gansey, too.

“Okay,” Adam said, bringing Gansey’s hand to his mouth to kiss his knuckles. “We’ll try to help her. We will. But Ronan comes first.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ronan and hennessy reach an agreement

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for this chapter is the same as other hennessy chapters: mental health, trauma, discussion of suicide/suicidality

Ronan woke to Hennessy’s lacquered talons raking across his face.

It was probably his fault, he mused, for not specifying _how_ she should wake him up.

Admittedly, this thought came after his instinctive reaction. _Pain ow fuck fuck fuck_ was answered by yanking the source of said pain away. It wasn’t like when he’d shoved her. By the time his sleep-groggy brain could piece together cognizant facts, his fingers were curled tightly around her wrist, holding her arm hostage inches from his face.

“What,” he said, “the fuck.”

Hennessy bared her teeth. “You grabbed me.”

“Yeah, after you went _feral barn cat_ on my fucking _face.”_

“No, dipstick, the grabbing prompted the barn cat behavior. Now you’re good and conscious, so do us both a favor and _release me.”_

Ronan let go of her wrist. They were still tangled in the covers, her body pressed against his in a manner more captive than intentional. It took him a good few seconds to figure out where the edge of the blanket burrito was, and then he yanked the covers off so she could roll away.

His cheek smarted.

Hennessy sat up. “I need a smoke.”

“Balcony.”

“Not with Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Douche out there. I refuse to tiptoe.”

“Then cope.” Ronan swung his legs off the bed and stood. His face hurt, yeah, but he was having trouble shaking himself awake even so. The shadows on the walls had teeth; the pale moon outside eyed him judgmentally. He turned away and made his way into the bathroom instead of meeting its stare.

His own mirrored face, at least, was familiar. Four welts arced from temple to cheek, ending near his mouth. It was a pretty badass look, actually. If Ronan was more into the “survivor of a werewolf attack” aesthetic, he’d ponder the merits of a scar.

This definitely wouldn’t scar, though. Despite how long her nails were, they’d barely broken the skin. The lines were angry, red, dramatic. But not actually harmful.

He didn’t know whether she’d held back or whether she just sucked at combat.

The injury didn’t actually make them even for how he’d shoved her days ago, but it was nice to pretend it did.

He splashed cool water over his face, which helped to restore some sense of equilibrium. He was digging the Neosporin out of the cluttered medicine cabinet when a shadow appeared in the doorway. Gansey or Adam would have been a likely culprit, but when he turned, he found Hennessy instead.

Of course.

“I didn’t even take out your eye,” she said, one well-lit glance the only necessary component for a diagnosis. “Stop acting murdered.”

“Maybe next time play some gentle wind chimes,” Ronan snapped, “instead of being a _feral fucking maniac.”_

As he dabbed the antiseptic onto his cheekbone, Hennessy stepped fully into the bathroom and closed the door like they shared a secret. She eyed him for one more long moment, amusement or cruelty curving her mouth, and then she yanked a fluffy towel from the rack and cast it onto the floor.

“More literal cat behavior,” Ronan observed, watching her in the mirror.

She grinned, the amusement coming through much clearer than the cruelty, and held a conspiratorial finger to her lips. With one foot, she arranged the towel so that it covered the gap below the door. It was then that Ronan noticed the pack of cigarettes in her other hand.

“I _will_ kick your ass out,” he said.

“Shh, shh. I’m showing you a magic trick.” She stepped past him to the shower, turning the spray on.

“So just to be clear,” he said, keeping his voice low, an attempt not to wake the sleeping parties in the living room, “you clawed my face to ribbons, need to smoke about it, and have now decided I deserve cancer, too.”

“You never did this as a kid, huh? Rural fucking farm boy, no weeds or tobaccos for you? At least tell me you’ve smoked a joint, Lynch.”

Humidity began to dampen the room, misting against the mirror. Ronan finished fucking with the scratches and turned toward Hennessy just in time to see her step into the shower. Fully-clothed. And pulling a lighter out of the pocket of her sweatpants. And somehow managing to keep the cigarettes safe from the shower while clearly caring fuckall about getting wet herself.

He had honestly lost the capacity to pitch a fit. She’d neatly plucked it from his fingertips. It had been a long time since anyone had played this game better than he did, acting with such brazen disregard for consequence or convention that argument became impossible.

So he just watched.

Hennessy did exactly what he thought she would, lighting up and exhaling smoke toward the vents. “Goes out with the steam,” she said. “A cigarette here or there doesn’t cause enough damage to piss off the landlords. Humidity covers the smell, fumes don’t push past the towel.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s bullshit.”

“Worked all right for my mum. She quit once every two months, God bless her. Had to drown her vices in the bathroom when she remembered sobriety sucks. Not for any deep-seated shame, mind you. She just couldn’t stand hearing a smug son-of-a-bitch say ‘told you so.’” 

Hennessy punctuated this little monologue with a long drag. After a moment of deliberation, Ronan flipped the lock on the bathroom door and then stepped into the shower with her.

“Mmm, better not,” she said, breathing a very deliberate cloud of acrid smoke into his face. “All those cancer chemicals.”

Ronan stood under the spray, letting it soak his shoulders. In truth, there hadn’t been deep reasoning behind the action besides wanting to prove she wasn’t fucking with him.

“So your mom,” he said. “That’s where the tragic past starts.”

“Oh, undoubtedly. She offed herself in front of me, I read somewhere that dead parents are a license for toxicity, and I used it as my sexy, sexy excuse to have fun. Only good thing she ever did for me, if we’re being honest.”

Ronan couldn’t tell whether she was lying. Probably, he decided, the story was the truth. But he doubted the flippant tone actually belied her feelings. Especially considering how much concentration she was using to puff on the cigarette.

There was an odd moment where her face glazed over, like she wasn’t looking at anything at all. Or like she was looking over the silhouetted heads of an audience to find the EXIT sign at the rear of the theater.

Then her eyes flicked back up to him, and she smiled. A real smile, even, like he’d seen last night. Crinkles at the corners of her eyes, dimple in her right cheek, the whole nine. “There,” she said, her tone deeply satisfied, though Ronan had no fucking clue what about. “Look at you. Sad little pit bull left out in the rain, and even so you’re half-yourself again.”

“I’ve been myself,” he said, just as deeply irritated as she was satisfied. Standing under the spray in soggy pajamas was starting to become more bothersome than principled, but he stayed put. Stubbornness was a powerful motivator. “Now I’m myself, plus carcinogens.”

Hennessy finished the cigarette and dropped the butt onto the shower floor. It missed both pairs of bare feet, but that seemed more coincidental than intentional. “Fine, then. Be a macho bastard about it.”

“Sorry,” he said, “was I not _myself_ when you clawed me to shit? Was I supposed to coo at you? I’m not that big a fucking pacifist.”

“You were hurting me,” Hennessy said. This wasn’t angry or defensive - just a simple statement of fact. “I woke you up.”

She turned the shower off and stepped out, her clothes so waterlogged that they squelched with every step. Puddles of water gathered around her feet, sliding across cracks in the tile.

“Alright,” Ronan said, “next time I roll over on you or whatever the fuck, how about you _shove_ me-”

“Lynch.” She reached out and gripped his wrist, the same sort of vice he’d used a few minutes ago. “I’m going to shove a fucking stiletto down your throat. You had a bad dream. Get the hell over it.”

Given a thousand years for analysis, Ronan still wouldn’t have been able to explain the lurch in his gut. Let alone the _reason_ behind the unsettled dread. “I did?”

“Ah. You’re an amnesiac dreamer.” She commandeered the second fluffy towel on the rack to wrap around herself, making a big show of peeling off the tank and sweats _after_ she’d covered up. They crumpled in a sad, sodden heap on the floor. “More’s the pity. You’ll never unlock your true artistic potential.”

Ronan stepped onto the tile floor with an equal amount of squelching. The journey to the door brought forth a small sheet of water. He could see the reflective sheen as he reached down and grabbed the door-blocking towel for himself.

Adam was going to have a goddamn fit. All things considered, though, a semi-flooded bathroom floor was not the worst thing they could fight about. Ronan left his own apparel with Hennessy’s and found them both a change of clothes in the bedroom, thanking God all the while that Adam and Gansey had slept through the ruckus.

The end result was him and Hennessy sitting in the bed in their fresh pajamas, each bedside lamp emitting a protective yellow glow against the night. When he stopped focusing on her, Ronan had to admit he was too disoriented to figure out what time it was. Too disoriented to figure out whether his mind or his body was responsible for the half-submerged haziness.

Hennessy laid back against the pillows as Ronan leaned forward and struggled to straighten the sheets. The endeavor would have gone much faster with two people, but she did not seem to care.

“I do _hope_ you were having a nightmare,” she said suddenly. They’d been sitting in silence for some time, but she picked up their earlier conversation like there’d been no pause. “If you did it on purpose, I _should_ have gouged an eye.”

“Still not clear on _what_ I did.”

“That settles that, then. I’m fucking thrilled it wasn’t me, by the way. I’ve gotten my requisite, oh, six hours or so. Thanks for the wakeup. If I dreamed, I’m just as forgetful as you.”

“That doesn’t usually happen,” Ronan said, and couldn’t for the life of him figure out why he did. She didn’t seem particularly afraid, so it wasn’t a reassurance. And she also wasn’t exactly the first person he’d go to for validation. “I sleep fine.”

“Sure, as far as you know. Bet Adam’s sitting on some strangulation horror stories.”

This further unsettled Ronan, until he remembered that Adam had a staunch zero tolerance policy for anything that annoyed him, let alone hurt him. If Ronan had done something violent, he was certain Adam wouldn't suffer in silence to spare his feelings.

“You were distracting me,” Ronan said, careful. "From the nightmare."

“I needed a smoke.” Hennessy shrugged. “You needed a distraction.”

Ronan wasn’t sure he’d needed a distraction, but he also couldn’t remember his dream. “So,” he said. “Your mom.”

“Oh, that was pure horseshit. Well, aside from the smoking and the vents. Those bits were true. The drama, though, please. I needed some good old-fashioned shock value to tug on your heartstrings. And there you went, giving a fuck about the hypothetical sad little girl inside the hypothetical traumatized me. No more mental spiraling for you. Cute.”

Ronan pulled the newly-untangled blankets over himself and laid down, turning away from her. An insistent pounding drummed at his temples and the base of his skull, a dull tension headache growing less dull by the minute. It was not a sensation brought on by nightmares.

He could try to untangle the reason for his upset. He didn’t think that would lead anywhere good, though. His more actionable plan was to go back to sleep, say fuck it, leave Hennessy to her own devices, and then his traitor mind whispered, _This is how it always felt with K._

Ronan could feel the tension in his jaw, a grinding concrete pressure that wasn’t helping the headache. Fuck this. If he had to think about Kavinsky, he damn well wasn’t going to do it in silence.

He rolled back to face her. She was tapping on her phone, but she glanced over at the motion.

“Don’t ever fucking do that again,” he said.

“Calm you down from a nightmare?” Hennessy scoffed. “How bitchy of me.”

Ronan rarely had the words necessary to quantify his internal storm. In some universe, maybe one where he was more like Gansey, he managed to tread a careful explanation. He told her that he’d had an ex who treated emotional intimacy like a joke. He told her that being mocked for caring led to injury far worse than anything she’d done to his face. He told her that he was kind of fucking done with being stepped on by people who didn’t care what or who they broke.

In this universe, though, he said, “Yeah. Don’t ever fucking do that again.”

She eyed him for a long moment. Then she snorted, derisive, and returned her attention to her phone. “Fine.”

“I’m serious.”

“Oh, I know. Don’t worry. I’m mortified over the misguided attempt at kindness. God only knows we shouldn’t tread _that_ path.”

She was angry. Ronan wouldn’t have known it when he’d first met her. But now he could read the bitterness underneath the sarcasm, an acidic edge that made it clear that she could stop caring about the intimacy they’d shared whenever she fucking wanted.

“Don’t fucking do that,” Ronan snarled.

“Do what.”

“Shut down.”

“I wasn’t powered on to begin with, mate.”

“If I tell you not to do something,” Ronan said, “you don’t get to make me the bad guy.”

“Well, if I try to take care of you for two seconds, you don’t get to make _me_ the bad guy either, but it appears neither of us gets what we want. That's what mature adults call compromise.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of this?” Ronan asked.

“Need some specifics here.”

“Tired of being fucking - nasty for the sake of being nasty. You’re sure as hell not enjoying it.”

Hennessy pressed her lips together. “I got the message loud and clear. This isn’t lovey-dovey shit you want from me. That’s fine. I also happen to think you’re a bastard, because you are. C’est la vie.”

“You can-” Ronan paused, because he wasn’t sure how to describe what she’d done right or wrong. He certainly wasn’t sure what this strange playact of emotional support would look like a second time, although he hoped any future endeavors would involve less cigarette smoke. “I’m talking about the lying. Don’t lie to me. Don’t fuck with me like that.”

She exhaled. “Okay.”

“I’ve got a thing about lying. I don’t do it, I don’t like when people do. Do not fuck with me.”

 _“Okay.”_ With an effort that involved several start-stops and much screwing-up of face, she muttered, “I’m sorry.”

“Whatever. It’s not like there’s a high fucking chance of this happening again either way.”

“You think I have enough self-preservation to avoid sleeping with you?”

“I told you. I don’t have nightmares.”

“Except when you do.”

“I don’t fucking remember what I dreamt. I _don’t have nightmares.”_

“Everyone has them sometimes. You seemed to be intimately fucking familiar earlier. ‘Dreams can’t kill you’ and all that. Unless you were bullshitting. Does your lying principle apply if you heavily imply a falsehood instead?”

“I don’t have nightmares _anymore,”_ Ronan corrected, grudgingly.

There was no logical reason for the insistence. Bad dreams weren’t a character failing. Ronan had less control over his subconscious than he did over most of his conscious actions. Having a nightmare didn’t mean that he was backsliding, getting worse, giving up, failing, falling.

But part of him kind of felt like a nightmare meant exactly that.

Hennessy’s gaze sharpened. For the first time, she set her phone aside, laying the screen facedown on the table. “When was your last one?”

“Fuck if I know. Years.” Ronan considered. “That I remember, anyway.”

“Hm.” If Ronan hadn’t been watching her face, he wouldn’t have seen the flash of distress. It was there and gone in a second. “Weird. Well, I’m slept well enough. Going to pop a Ritalin and head home. Thanks for the free hotel.”

“Don’t,” Ronan said, and had no fucking clue what he was asking. Don’t _what?_ Leave? He couldn’t blame her for escaping an apartment filled with a bunch of sleeping guys and none of her stuff. “Fuck it, fine. You’re heading out, I’ll come with. Let’s get Dennys. I’m starving.”

“Oh, no. I know how you are with 24-hour diners, Ronan Lynch. You’ll try to get me to serve my soul on a platter.” 

She stood and picked up her backpack, setting it on the bed. As she rooted through the main pocket, Ronan said, “Text me, at least.”

“Wow. Needy.”

“So I know you’re _alive,_ shithead.”

“I’ll let you or Adam know, sure. I promise I have no current intention of offing myself.”

That was far from a reassuring promise, but Ronan wouldn’t have believed her if she said she’d sworn off her contingency plan for good. ‘No current intention’ was the best he could hope for.

“Are you gonna come back?” Ronan asked.

Her hands paused in their rifling.

“Because it kinda feels like you’re bolting.”

“I’m just going home.”

“Sure,” Ronan said. “But are you gonna come back?”

“Oh, maybe, maybe not. Who knows. I go with the flow. Very zen.” 

“Right. Here’s the thing, though.” Ronan took a deep breath. “If you’re gonna be in my life, you gotta be in it. And if you’re not, then you’re not. I’m _not_ a fan of drama.”

He didn’t think this was unreasonable. He himself abhorred strict schedule and routine and repressed impulsivity. And it wasn’t like he’d ever tried to rein in the freewheeling adventure that came with loving Noah and Blue. He just needed to know that when someone left, it wasn’t a forever goodbye.

He didn’t think this was unreasonable. 

He reminded himself of that several times.

Hennessy offered a wan smile. Then her mouth crumpled. She sat on the edge of the bed, her breath shuddering out as Ronan scooted over beside her.

“I think I made a mistake,” she said.

“What was it?”

Hennessy snorted and shook her head. When that didn’t seem to restore equilibrium, she pressed her hands to her eyes.

“You know, for someone who claims to be a demon bitch from hell,” Ronan said, “you cry a _lot.”_

“Fuck off,” she replied, but it was with a watery laugh.

Ronan considered his next words carefully. Some of his relationships had been started through question-and-answer, but the other party had always done the asking. Gansey, Blue. With Noah, they’d fit so well there hadn’t been a need for discussion. With Adam, both of them had managed not to talk about _anything_ until lack-of-definition became impossible to work around.

Which meant that Ronan had little experience affirming commitment aloud. He’d worked on learning to do it to a certain extent, for Gansey and occasionally for Blue, but it wasn’t his natural form of communication. He thought he’d been clear enough in his body language last night, when he took off Hennessy’s makeup and held her as she cried. If she hadn’t understood the signals, he needed to try again.

And if she _had_ understood the signals, he needed the rejection to become official.

“I’d be down to meet non-crying Hennessy,” he said. “Whoever the fuck she is. Behind all the venom.”

“It’s cute that you assume there’s something besides the crying and the venom.”

“Is there really not?” Ronan pressed. “I mean, fuck it, you’ve gotta slough the outer shell sometimes. What do you do when you can’t take the piss out of anyone? Do you, like, _immediately_ dissolve?”

“No. I get high.”

“Jesus.” Ronan shook his head, mostly with amazement and a tinge of baffled admiration. “You’re a therapist’s worst fucking nightmare.”

“I’m a therapist’s wet dream. _Years_ doing the same fucking lesson. No new material necessary. Rake in the big bucks repeating the same script with zero efficacy.”

Ronan had to admit that this viewpoint held water, if you were a cynic. "All right,” he said. “I’d be down to _find_ non-crying, sober Hennessy.”

“You don’t want to meet her. Trust me.”

“What’s she like?”

“Dead.”

Ronan was not going to be deterred by shitty deflection. “I’d be down to _resurrect_ non-crying Hennessy.”

“You’re not a necromancer, Lynch.”

“And you’re not a corpse.”

Hennessy’s hand twitched, like it couldn’t decide whether or not to curl into a fist. Ronan reached out and took it instead, lacing their fingers together.

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” she said. “This isn't a lead-up to acquiescence, either, so don’t get all aflutter. This is me telling you that you’ve got no fucking clue what you’re playing with.”

Ronan believed he knew better than she thought he did, but explaining why would take a long-ass time, and it wouldn’t help anyway. “Duly noted.”

“You’re having nightmares because of me.”

He bit back his instinctive sarcasm. _Got it. You’re beaming psychic witchery into my head._ The sentiment might buy him time, but he knew what she meant, what she was thinking. He could follow the paths her mind had traced to their logical conclusion. Ronan hadn’t had bad dreams for years; Hennessy had fallen into his life with all her baggage and all her drama; Ronan was suddenly having nightmares. It didn’t take a genius to pinpoint the cause.

“So you’re running,” he said.

“Look, here’s the deal.” Hennessy spread her free arm wide, but she wasn’t making any effort to pull her hand from Ronan’s. “It’s like you said. The half-in, half-out bullshit won’t work. I can’t fuck around pretending it will. So I have to be all-out. You’ll have nightmares for a couple weeks, then you’re back to normal. And don’t say you won’t be. You might care, but even your heroic savior ass isn’t immune to time’s numbing march.”

“Right. And then you die.”

“And then it’s not your fucking concern because I’m not part of your life anymore.”

This came with the conviction of a zealot espousing the correctness of their faith. Ronan believed that Hennessy believed that this was the best solution. Maybe the only solution. He didn’t know much about her life, where she lived, or who cared about her.

But he took a shot in the dark.

“When did you last talk to your sister?”

Hennessy flinched hard enough that Ronan felt it through his entire arm.

Bullseye.

Ronan knew he was pressing on a bruise. He wasn’t gentle about it. “Did she cut you off, or did you run?”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not her.”

“I am aware, yes. Thank you for bringing the difference to my attention. Your physique and scowl and pasty skin are all wrong, now that I’m squinting in a better light-”

“You’re just gonna hurt me if you run.”

Sentiments like these were also ones Ronan was not accustomed to verbalizing, but he didn’t need Adam or Gansey to do his talking for him. He was beginning to realize that honing his shove-everyone-away skillset had left his openly-connect-with-others skillset a little rusty. Which didn’t usually matter, since the consequences amounted to disapproving glares and ejection from political dinners.

It mattered now.

“And I won’t hurt you if I stay?” Hennessy’s laugh was incredulous, half-wild.

“You sure as fuck will if you keep doing the shit you’ve been doing,” Ronan said. “But you’re fucking miserable. I’m tired of waiting for you to admit you’re fucking miserable.”

“I’ve come to terms with that quite handily, actually. Is that what you’ve been waiting for? I’m fucking miserable, Lynch. Bask in your vindication.”

“You don’t think you can get better.” When Hennessy opened her mouth, Ronan pressed on, “You don’t see anything else. Misery or death, no third option, right? People don’t kill themselves when they have another way out.”

“You’re not gonna be my way out, Lynch.”

Arguing this felt dangerous. Ronan was certain that he was asking for something different from being a knight on a white horse, an answer to prayer, a cure. But he was equally certain that his limitations with language would make explanation impossible.

He took another shot in the dark. “Earlier, you asked me to tell you what I wanted from you. What I wanted you to do so you could sleep.”

“I was delirious.”

“Can I do that again? Tell you what I want? Will you let me do that?”

Hennessy eyed him cautiously, and then turned her gaze to their twined hands. “I suppose,” she said, “but there’s no guarantee I’ll give it to you.”

“I want you to stay,” Ronan said immediately. It was important, he thought, that she know this above all else. The rest came slower, as he tried to reason through the sentences. “I want you to keep doing whatever the fuck you’re doing with Adam. I want you to drive the Pig. I kinda want you to wreck it, but that’s just so I won’t be the only one who has. I want you to meet Noah and Blue. I want you to find something you want to wake up for. I want you to figure out a reason to live that’s - that’s not just some fucking ongoing _martyrdom_ that doesn’t even solve anything.”

Hennessy’s mouth pinched, her eyes squeezing shut as though bracing against a blow. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Well, tough shit. You have and you will, probably a fuckton, no matter what you do. So how about you give me the hurt I’m asking for instead of fucking me up with the hurt I’m not.”

She swallowed. “You’re asking me to move mountains here, Lynch.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re asking me to - to get all gung-ho about your little prayer circle, because you got your crazy meds fixed right so you think everybody can-”

“I’m _not.”_ Ronan squeezed her hand, harder than he meant to. “Hennessy.”

She turned her face away.

 _“Hennessy.”_ He shifted slightly, angling his body toward her so that he could gently take her chin in his free hand. “Look at me.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m not making you promise.”

“Bullshit you’re not. Oh, sure, this is the happy puppy rainbows solution for everyone - if it works. If it doesn’t, you’re a million times more brainfucked than if you’d let me go now. And you won’t fucking consider that because you won’t admit it might go sideways. The fatal flaw of a relentless optimist.”

Ronan could tell her that he wouldn’t consider it because there was no way life was completely hopeless. He could tell her that that outlook wasn’t optimism, it was survival. Noah would have done that. Noah would have been able to infect the sentiment with enough earnestness and genuine joy that doubt became impossible.

That wasn't who Ronan was ever going to be.

“I’ll let you,” he said instead. “If you try - if _we_ try, and we’ve done everything, and I mean fucking everything, and it’s still - if you still want - I’ll let you.”

Hennessy stopped breathing.

Ronan had thought, on the night they met, that he might be the worst person alive. Now he was sure of it. “So there’s really nothing to lose,” he added, and prayed the desperation wouldn’t leak into his voice.

“You’re telling me what you think I want to hear.”

“I don’t lie.”

Hennessy swallowed again. “And if you get sick of me? If I ruin your life, if you want me gone?”

“Then for the love of God, stop doing whatever you’re doing that’s making me lose my shit.”

“This is a mistake,” Hennessy said. “You’re using the charisma and logic of a cult leader to make it sound less like a mistake. I’m extremely impressed, I had no idea you were capable. As a result, I am also having trouble itemizing my list of reasons why I should not agree to this. And yet I’m positive that there are _so many.”_

“It’s not a binding contract," Ronan insisted, pressing his advantage. "It’s just sticking around. If you get sick of _me,_ you can go.” He paused. “Just let me make sure you’ve got somewhere to go back to.”

Hennessy’s breath rasped through her open mouth. She shuddered.

“I want you to trust me,” Ronan said quietly, and there was no hiding the desperation this time. “Please. Please, just once, just trust me. Trust me.”

Her exhale this time came with a release of the tension in her muscles. She slumped, listing sideways against Ronan and laying her head against his shoulder. He hadn’t noticed how rigid her posture had been, and only now realized how tense his own body was.

 _Please,_ he thought, but he’d already said it, so he just buried his face in her hair.

“Okay,” she whispered.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hennessy and ronan both talk to jordan. they are also both unbelievably bad at it

So everything truly was different now.

No more gray-blue twilight. No more half-alive agitation. Hennessy had made her choice, or at least had been cleverly coerced into her choice, and now all that was left was to commit to her new direction.

She just wasn’t sure how to do that.

She’d never exactly been the “memorizing the recovery handbook” type.

Ronan didn’t seem to want anything further, now that he’d won his case, so she laid down and rested beside him. She spent several hours studying the swirling patterns on the ceiling, tracing fantastical constellations and painting imaginary canvases. Part of her worried that sleep would clamp its iron jaws around her, but the fear proved unfounded: she hadn’t felt this awake in a long time.

Whenever she glanced toward Ronan, expecting him to be asleep, she instead found a similarly wide-eyed ghost. Similarly studying the ceiling instead of her. Similarly checked the fuck out of this material plane.

As the palest gray light began to press against the windows, Hennessy broke the silence. “I need to call Jordan.”

“Your sister?”

“That’s the bitch.” Hennessy sat up and raked her hands a few times through her hair. She thought there might still be days-old gravel caught in the curls. Probably she’d turned the bed into a quarry. “I need to call her.”

“What for?”

This seemed like a stupid question, not to mention none of his business. Besides, Hennessy didn’t know how to explain. The impulse wasn't rational. It was a soulbound conviction, a need that pressed against her throat like thirst or pain or a desperate suffocating gasp.

She needed Jordan to know everything was different. She needed Jordan to know she was going to fix things. She needed Jordan to know that Hennessy probably wasn’t going to get better, but that when she died, it wouldn’t be because she hadn’t tried hard enough.

She needed Jordan to stop worrying.

She needed Jordan to stop thinking about her.

She needed Jordan to stop texting her.

She needed Jordan to live her own life.

She needed Jordan to say that it was okay to come home a little later, once Hennessy had become someone worth the welcome, because she knew Hennessy was being truthful and there would always be a place for her and they would always be sisters, even after everything Hennessy had done.

“I just need to,” Hennessy said.

“Got it.” She glanced sharply at him, but she couldn’t detect any sarcasm in the tone or his face. He added, “You kicking me out?”

Hennessy wasn’t sure she’d have the strength to do this without Ronan beside her. That was just one more unsettling thought to add to the pile, set aside, ban from further examination.

She shook her head. "Stay."

Jordan’s sleep schedule was as varied as Hennessy’s, though not for the same drug-induced reasons. Even as kids, she’d never enjoyed a proper circadian rhythm. Normal people wouldn’t be awake at this ungodly hour, but Jordan might be. Hennessy just wouldn't know whether she’d been awake all night or stirred at the crack of dawn.

Hennessy texted, _u up?_

Jordan’s reply came three seconds later. _Yes_

_can i call u?_

Six seconds after that, Hennessy’s phone screen lit up. Of course Jordan wouldn’t let her make the call her own damn self. Hennessy felt slightly robbed of her deep metaphorical moment, and more than slightly annoyed about it, even though she knew Jordan was just being efficient.

She considered letting it go to voicemail and then calling back out of sheer pettiness. Then she swiped to answer. “This is the esteemed office of Baller and Bitchard,” she informed the receiver, whipping out her poshest accent. “How may I direct your call?”

“I’m looking for Heloise,” Jordan said cheerfully, “although she has a dozen other names. Shall I dig out my encyclopedia of aliases?”

They’d only been apart a year.

Hennessy had forgotten Jordan’s nickname for her.

What an idiotic thing to forget. After their mother shot herself, Hennessy had refused to keep the name Jay, even if it was printed on her birth certificate. She hadn't chosen another. One more asinine metaphor, she supposed. She'd never felt the need to build a new self from the ashes.

But Jordan claimed it was too strange to call Hennessy by their own last name, and so.

And so.

It was like nothing had changed at all. A month ago, that realization would have made Hennessy want to die. Now, she pressed a hand over her mouth to muffle her quick exhale of relief. _“That_ bitch?” she said. “Right piece of work, she is. Harlot material.”

“Oh, trust me, I’m painfully aware,” Jordan replied, “but if you want someone to do a job right, well.”

Hennessy held the phone from her ear for two seconds, just long enough to flash Ronan a shit-eating grin. One of his eyebrows was arched, but he didn’t look all that befuddled by the idiotic roleplay.

Then she took a breath, returned her attention to the call, and switched back to her actual voice. “Anybody with this number knows not to interrupt me when I’m in a business meeting. I’m a hardworking bastard.”

“Aren’t we all,” Jordan said. “Luckily, I'm filled with this deep and abiding love for you, so I’ll keep the chat short and sweet. Where are you?”

“Cloud Nine.”

“That good, huh?” Nothing had changed - Hennessy could still feel the disappointment like a slap, even without seeing Jordan’s face. It hurt worse after so much time apart. She'd forgotten how bad the guilt felt. “For a moment there I nearly worried something was amiss. Just left a rave, then?”

“At this second, I am painfully sober. Don’t worry, the state is far from permanent. Try not to collapse and die from the shock.”

“The shock that you’re sober, or that it isn’t permanent?”

“Either.” Hennessy shrugged, though Jordan couldn’t see it. “Just wanted to hear your voice.”

“It’s good to hear yours,” Jordan said, earnest.

Hennessy didn’t like that. It was better when they were shitting around, only approaching sincerity through sideways irony and shitty deflection. At their best - at their worst, maybe, depending on the perspective - they never had a conversation that resembled anything remotely genuine.

“You doing all right?” Jordan asked.

“Well. I’m alive.”

This was a perfect opening for a sarcastic response. Hennessy offered it as though begging for a lifeline, because she desperately wanted Jordan to carry them back to level ground.

Apparently Jordan was no longer quite enough like her to meet expectations.

“That’s good,” Jordan said instead. “There were a few rough nights when I feared that might not be the case.”

“Let’s not,” Hennessy said quickly. The attempt at subtlety clearly hadn’t worked. She didn’t want to think about this. She didn’t want to imagine the parallel timeline where Jordan had been called to identify her broken body in the morgue.

Jordan paused. “All right,” she said, matching Hennessy’s haste with caution, and that was just as awful as the earnestness. “What’s the occasion, then? New developments from the land of parties and strobe lights?”

This was Hennessy’s chance to set everything right. Even if she couldn't manage that, it was at least her chance to make Jordan stop walking on fucking eggshells. But she discovered, suddenly, that she didn’t want to tell the story. She didn’t want to string together a tale from beginning to end. She didn’t want to announce _I met my soulmate_ and face the anxieties, demands, questions. She didn’t know how to explain the situation with Ronan without explaining the rest. She didn’t know how to explain what he was to her. She didn’t even fucking _know_ what he was to her, only that he was Something, and that it mattered.

Shitty deflection it was.

“I met a guy,” Hennessy said.

“Oh, God,” Jordan replied.

“You know, that’s what I miss most. The unfailing enthusiasm and support.”

“Sorry.”

Hennessy winced. Silence fell. The connection filled with static and the quiet sound of Jordan’s breathing. An apology from Jordan - over something Hennessy absolutely deserved, no less - meant that she was scared. She was playing defense. She thought that any escalation might cause an explosion that drove Hennessy away for good.

So some things had changed.

All Hennessy’s fault, in the end.

Calling had been a mistake. Hennessy was making a mistake. She was making a giant fucking mistake, and she was about to ruin Jordan all over again, and the fallout would be far worse than anything she’d done to Ronan. She cast around the room for something to change the subject, ignoring Ronan’s frown.

“So-” she started, just as Jordan said, “You met a guy?”

Hennessy gripped the phone tighter. “Yeah.”

“Roomie sort of situation?”

“Kind of.”

“When do I get to meet him?”

Mistake. Mistake. Mistake.

“You don’t,” Hennessy said.

Another silence fell.

“Yet,” she added, hoping Jordan would accept the placation.

“Okay,” Jordan said slowly. “So, what have you been doing these past few months? I mean, besides the guy.”

There really wasn’t anything worth telling. Certainly nothing that would ease Jordan’s worry. “Oh, you know, this and that.”

“How about we meet up for coffee?”

The way Jordan said it, Hennessy could tell she’d been dying to get the words out for ages. Since the start of the conversation, maybe. Or maybe since the day Hennessy had run.

“I don’t know if you’re still in the city,” Jordan continued, “but it’s been a while since I had a proper road trip anyway. I’m dying for an excuse. You have to meet my new car. She doesn’t look like much, and she's had a long life, but damned if she can’t hit 140 like some kind of blue-haired eighty-five year old in a mosh pit.”

“Radar detection?”

“I’m not sure radar existed when they built her back in the Stone Age."

“But you fixed that up, right?”

When Jordan replied, Hennessy heard a smile for the first time. Something in her chest unclenched. “I sure did. Haven’t crossed a cop in months.”

“What about a spoiler? She got a spoiler?”

“Another aftermarket addition. Definitely not meant for this model. I love it. There’s something about tricking out a car that was never destined for anything but shuttling grandmas to shopping malls. Feels like I gave her a whole new purpose. Admittedly, she’s also a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster.”

“I demand photos.”

“I’ll send you some. It’s been months and I still haven’t found a proper name.”

“‘Frankenstein’s monster’ doesn’t tickle your fancy?”

“That’s _what_ she is, not _who_ she is,” Jordan chided. “Monsters deserve real names too, don’t you think? No need to bear the sins of their creators. Comes too close to the horror of surnames.”

Hennessy leaned forward until her forehead touched the mattress. “I’ll whip out the baby name sites. No time to make the freak of nature's acquaintance today, though. I’m all booked out for months.”

“I see,” Jordan said, amused. “I remember how much work you put into scheduling your precious time. Never a moment wasted, yeah?”

This was the sarcasm Hennessy had been craving. God knew Hennessy’s life was made up of nothing except wasted moments. Schedules and deadlines and kept promises were anathema to her. “I’ve got, like, fourteen commissions,” she said, willing herself to sound sincere and apologetic. “At least four of the clients plan to dump my body in a lake if I don’t deliver.”

“Sounds like something we could solve with a double trouble play.”

“No,” Hennessy said.

It was too short, abrupt, a shutdown that preemptively silenced any argument. Hennessy should have pretended not to care. She should have implied her lack of interest through thirty seconds of inane monologue.

Jordan had just startled her. That was all. Hennessy spent so much time focused on her own crazy that she sometimes forgot that her sister was also out of her fucking mind.

To soften the sharpness, she added, “Sometime, maybe. But not with this.”

“That sounds an awful lot like a girl in deep shit.”

Fuck. God dammit. How had Hennessy made it _worse?_ “I don’t want to talk about me. Let’s talk about you. What have _you_ been up to?”

Jordan, because she was Jordan, wouldn’t let the fucking dogs lie. “I kinda want to hear more about this guy you’re with. How about a trade? I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours?”

Hennessy hung up.

“Fuck,” she muttered.

Ronan shook his head and whistled, impressed. “I think,” he said, “you might be the first person I’ve ever met who’s worse at sibling shit than I am.”

Hennessy flipped him off. A half-second later, her phone began to vibrate as Jordan called back. Her arm jerked, reflexively trying to pitch the device at a wall as though it was an attacking scorpion. The phone was only saved by Ronan’s quick interception.

_“Okay,”_ he said, plucking it from her fingertips. He watched the lit screen without moving, allowing the call to go to voicemail. Hennessy braced for a renewed assault, but then she realized that Ronan was holding down the power button. The darkened screen wouldn’t light back up, a body dragged beneath the surface for too long. At least that was one problem solved.

“That was the worst thing I’ve ever done,” Hennessy said. “Oh, God.”

“Honestly, if _that’s_ the worst thing, you’re in pretty good shape.”

He didn’t get it. He couldn’t. “Fuck,” she muttered again. “I need-”

“A smoke, yeah, I know.”

Hennessy thought about venturing onto the balcony and inhaling the morning air. She thought about lighting up and charring her lungs as the sun rose behind the clouds. The endeavor would have taken too much effort. She didn't think she could walk.

If she’d been in the mansion, she could have chain-smoked her way through half a pack while laying indolently on the mattress. The mansion was a lawless place. No rules, no boundaries, no comfort. She could let herself wither exactly how she wanted, when she wanted.

It occurred to her then that she wanted the brisk morning air, and she wanted to survey the city, and she wanted to hold the killing smoke inside her lungs, but she didn’t want to jump.

It had been a long time since heights had inspired anything except the desire to jump.

“Ronan,” she said.

She didn’t think she could manage more than that, just like she didn’t think she could walk. The panic was a living creature inside her, a thrashing animal that tore against her ribcage. Jordan would think Hennessy had called to say goodbye. Jordan would think that Hennessy was going to kill herself. If Hennessy called back and told the truth, Jordan would think there was hope, and Hennessy would destroy her all over again. If Hennessy lied, she’d need to come up with the alibi of a lifetime and perform like her life depended on it.

Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. There were reasons she hadn’t contacted Jordan, and those reasons hadn't ceased to exist just because she wanted to try. _Mistake. Mistake. Mistake._

Hennessy shouldn’t have listened to a fucking word Ronan had said.

She shouldn’t have let herself live long enough to feel any of this.

Ronan’s hand pressed against her back, a firm pressure between her shoulderblades. She drew in a gasp and lifted her head. But she didn’t try to manage more than that. Her gaze fell on Ronan’s other hand, which was snarled in the sheets, dragging the blankets back into shape.

“Scoot,” he told her, and she did, so he could grab the covers she sat on.

“Lie down,” he added, so she did, and then he pulled the warm blankets back over both of them and hugged her close.

“I can’t,” Hennessy gasped against his collarbone. “She - she’ll think - I can’t, I _can’t.”_

“Alright, okay, okay. That’s fine.”

“It’s _not,_ you don’t _know-”_

He didn’t know a goddamn thing. That wasn’t his fault. But Hennessy knew that even if she didn’t call Jordan back, even if she never spoke to Jordan again, Jordan would still spend the rest of today trying to make contact. And then Jordan would spend the next weeks and months calling Hennessy’s old crowd and the local hospitals and the morgues while checking the obituaries. And when Hennessy’s name did finally appear, Jordan would spend the rest of her life blaming herself for saying the wrong thing during this one useless phone call.

“Relax,” Ronan said. “Relax, relax, relax.”

Hennessy almost bit him.

She considered it a miracle of self-restraint that she did not.

There wasn’t anything to do except weather the anxiety attack. It became an extremely annoying distraction from the way Hennessy wanted to yell at Ronan, which was probably good, because Ronan didn't deserve to be yelled at. Ronan, for his part, just tucked the blankets more securely around them and held her tight as she hyperventilated.

The attack passed, like all anxiety attacks did. As her body calmed, Hennessy was pleased to find herself dry-eyed. One whole fucking time she'd managed not to cry. Victory.

When she caught her breath, Ronan said, “Let me talk to her.”

“You’re loopy.”

“You wanted her to know you’re okay, right? I’ll tell her. Then I won't ever talk to her again, on account of not caring about your fucking drama.”

This mistake was all Hennessy’s, but she couldn’t find a singlehanded solution. It wasn’t fair to foist the problem on Ronan. At the very least, though, he probably couldn’t make it _worse._

Hennessy also wasn’t confident that Ronan could make it _better,_ given the Everything About Him. But allowing Ronan to call was preferable to lying here picturing Jordan's increasingly frantic dials.

“Fine,” she said.

-

Ronan stepped carefully around the two sleeping couch potatoes, pushed open the sliding door, and stepped into the bracing morning air. The chill helped drag him further out of the strange nighttime spell from earlier.

(“I don’t want to fucking hear it,” Hennessy had snarled at him after she’d unlocked the screen, so he’d shrugged and left her in the bedroom.)

Jordan’s number wasn’t difficult to find. There were eight missed calls, four voicemails. Ronan just had to tap the pop-up notification. No contacts-list-scrolling necessary.

“Okay,” said a breathless voice, halfway through the first ring, “I give, I give, we don’t have to talk about you. Let’s-”

“Wrong person,” Ronan said.

The voice halted abruptly. In the silence, Ronan imagined a Hennessy lookalike peering at her screen to double-check the contact name.

Though Ronan was an Olympic medalist in uncomfortable silence, he didn’t actually mean to lengthen this one. He just wasn’t sure how to have this conversation if Hennessy’s sister didn’t start.

“Could you put her back on the line, then, mate?” the voice said. “Do me a solid. Tell her the power play worked. I fold, I lost the game of chicken, and other some such metaphors.”

Jordan had Hennessy’s accent, Hennessy’s cadence, even some of Hennessy’s rough edges. But she lacked Hennessy’s venom or bitterness, and she also lacked Hennessy's hint of a smoker's rasp. Ronan was pretty sure he'd be able to tell them apart if they tried to con him.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” Ronan said.

Sugarcoating it was a waste of fucking time. Life would be a lot easier if everyone cut the fucking bullshit and just said what they meant.

“She seemed inclined to talk mere minutes ago,” Jordan said, wry. “I'll admit, her moods can be fickle, but I’m also certain that I'm capable of coaxing her back to the negotiating table.”

“You aren't,” Ronan said. There was no way he was going to convince Hennessy to make nice. Best to shut the possibility down now, lest Jordan think she had a chance of moving him. “You’re stuck with me.”

“So,” Jordan said, “I take it you’re the guy?”

“That’s me.”

Another silence fell. In this one, Ronan found himself wondering whether her pauses were the same as Hennessy’s. Whether she calculated her speeches for maximum impact, or whether she took the more Gansey-like approach of carefully considered diplomacy.

“I would very much like to talk to my sister,” Jordan said finally.

Ronan groaned. “Look,” he said, “can we move the fuck on? I don’t want to be here all day.”

“Text me an address. I’ll come pick her up.”

“Jesus.” Ronan leaned against the balcony railing, studying the ground far below, considering how long the phone would fall if it slipped through his fingers. “Anybody ever tell you you’ve got a one track mind?”

Another long, odd pause.

“All right,” Jordan said, and took an audible breath. “Here’s the situation, from my perspective. I don’t know you. You don’t know her. She and I are estranged. So if she’s calling me, that leads me to believe she’s in trouble. She tells me there are dangerous people around her, she mentions she’s met someone new, and then she hangs up without warning. Given our history, I assume it was a dramatic fit, particularly when she turns off her phone. And then, miracle of miracles, my mobile rings. And I pick it up. And instead of my sister on the other end, it’s you.”

This seemed like an unnecessarily specific way of describing things Ronan already knew. “Sure,” he said, “sounds accurate enough.”

“So, when you see the situation from my perspective,” Jordan said, “I imagine you understand my slight concern.”

Ronan didn’t, and then he did.

“Oh,” he said. “No, hey, chill. It’s not like that.”

Because Jordan was afraid. She'd been afraid for... the whole call, maybe. Ronan hadn’t noticed the fear - either because he hadn’t been looking or because he was oblivious. Or because he’d been too busy comparing her voice to Hennessy’s to read her actual feelings.

“I will feel significantly better with an address,” Jordan said, “so I can make sure of that.”

Casual, conversational. She hadn’t adopted the tone of a terrified family member negotiating for a hostage release. She also hadn’t adopted the tone of an actual hostage negotiator. Instead, it was the kind of placating approach that -

Ronan cut his thought short, recognizing a dangerous spiral when he saw one. “I can’t send the address,” he said, “but lemme compromise. One sec.”

The journey through the door, back around the couch mattress, down the hallway, and into the bedroom took about thirty seconds. Hennessy looked up from where she’d commandeered the middle of the mattress. When she saw the phone still held by Ronan’s ear, her expression curdled.

_No,_ she mouthed, punctuating the sentiment with an emphatic double-handed _get the fuck out_ gesture.

“She thinks I hit you,” Ronan informed her at a normal volume, helpfully, for Jordan’s benefit. “You wanna do me a favor and quash the rumor mill?”

He stepped forward to offer her the phone, but Hennessy repeated her _OUT_ gesture. “Fuck you,” she said. Ronan assumed this sentiment was directed at him, except then she added, “Your grand scheme is to pick a fight with the guy you think is a wifebeater? That’s how you’re saving my sorry ass? Piss off. I’d have killed him my own damn self since everyone else is apparently fucking useless. _God._ Him hitting me. I ought to pretend he did to make a point, you awful fucking bitch. I’m fine. Talk to him or hang up, I’m finished. Good fucking night.”

She flopped back with a borderline-violent movement and turned away from Ronan.

Ronan was absolutely not going to weigh in on that little speech, although he had found it both disproportionate and extremely impressive. He threaded his way from the room as Jordan remained speechless on the other end of the line. “We cool?” he asked.

On the couch, Adam hummed a questioning noise and lifted his head. Ronan made a _go back to sleep_ motion in his direction as he returned to the chill.

Jordan cleared her throat. “That was stupid of me, I apologize,” she said, and now she definitely sounded like Gansey. “She was right - my accusation would endanger her safety if you were a violent person. I should know better. I do know better. I’m out of practice with these games. She likely won’t accept my apologies, but do let her know I’m feeling very chastised. In the meanwhile, however, you are...?”

“A guy.”

“All right, A Guy. Do you happen to know her reasons for calling?”

Ronan remained firmly committed to his no-bullshit principle. Because of this, he didn’t take nearly as much time as she did to frame the truth. “She was gonna tell you that she’ll talk to you once she’s got her fucking act together.”

“And she couldn’t do that herself because...?”

“I can’t believe you have to ask me that,” Ronan said. “I thought you guys were twins.”

Jordan made a sound somewhere between a deep sigh and an obliging laugh. “Point. So what, exactly, does ‘getting her act together’ entail?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your fucking business.”

Ronan definitely meant to be hostile this time. The responding silence felt more surprised than cautious, although he had no actual way to tell.

“I won’t defend myself to you,” Jordan said eventually. “I only asked due to the fairly vast difference between rehab and heroin.”

“Closer to rehab than heroin.” At least, Ronan hoped.

“But not an official bullseye? No intake counselors hovering around, asking preachy questions?”

“Like I said,” Ronan repeated, “none of your fucking business.”

He didn’t actually know anything about Jordan. He certainly didn’t know what had happened between her and Hennessy. Judging by Hennessy’s little tirade, he’d hazard a guess that he knew who the more tumultuous party in the conflict was. But his years-old long-since-resolved fights with Declan had left him with nothing if not a deep suspicion of Responsible Siblings.

Declan hadn't really been in the wrong. Ronan knew that, now that he'd had the time and space to work past his adolescent rage. It was just that Ronan also understood the kind of poison that led to a vicious familial fallout, and he couldn't help empathizing with the shittier party.

Plus, Ronan knew what it was to be the one abandoned. If Jordan was the Responsible Sibling, she probably had People. A life, a job, friends, aspirations. Ronan wasn't gonna harm her by deciding his loyalty was to her fuckup sister instead.

Jordan didn’t respond. For a moment, Ronan thought she’d hung up, but the screen informed him that the call was still connected. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Now that he'd trapped himself in the conversation, he couldn’t remember why the fuck he’d thought he could do this without sounding like a serial killer.

He hadn’t been thinking about it at all, really. Hadn’t been thinking about the mechanics of talking on the phone, manipulating the stranger on the other end, modulating his voice to achieve the desired results.

He’d just been thinking about Hennessy.

“Look,” he tried, backing off, matching Jordan's earlier placating tone, “I don’t want to fuck with you. I just called to tell you she’s okay, but she doesn’t want to talk. She might want to talk someday. Not today. She wanted you to know that she’s trying. That’s all. Okay?”

“She can’t talk to me,” Jordan said, “and she can’t see me.”

“Doesn’t want to.”

“Is it..." Jordan hesitated. "Religion-related?”

Ronan laughed - he couldn’t help it. Hennessy _had_ called him a cult leader, but he doubted he met Jordan’s criteria. “No.”

“I think you ought to know,” Jordan said calmly, “that I am significantly more worried for her now than I was yesterday. If that is to change, I will need more concrete information.”

“Just give her space.” Ronan sat down in one of the plastic chairs, tipping his head back against the wall. “She just needs some fucking space.”

“So I’m not to contact her." A sharp breath. "This is about handling me.” Jordan’s voice had flattened, edging much closer to Hennessy’s usual tone. “That's the end goal, yeah? That was the original purpose? She meant to pet me like a puppy and then disappear for months. She hoped I’d be satisfied enough to stop seeking her. Perfect fucking manipulator. Anything to avoid saying the words aloud.”

Ronan tried to figure out how to explain that that hadn’t been the intention. But honestly, what did he know about Hennessy’s intentions? What did he know about what she wanted from this? He knew she’d been terrified of hurting Jordan. He was pretty sure that Jordan was angry enough to stop being worried, which meant she'd stop spending her mental energy on Hennessy. He was also pretty sure that he’d never manage to craft a more positive non-worried solution.

“Yeah,” he said. "Sure."

Jordan laughed. That laugh, cold and mirthless, might have sounded just like Hennessy’s if it hadn’t been so obviously close to tears. “Well. Tell her she needn’t do the deed by phone. I’m plenty versed in texted disappointments. Don’t trouble yourself. I won’t be a problem going forward.”

Ronan opened his mouth to say something, though he wasn't sure what.

The line went dead.

Ronan studied the Call Ended notification until the screen darkened and the phone locked.

Well. That was that, then. Possibly he’d achieved what Hennessy had wanted, in a horrible sideways sort of manner: Jordan wasn’t worrying. Jordan was going to give Hennessy space. Jordan wasn't going to wait around for Hennessy's recovery. Positive outcomes.

He rationalized this, carefully, because the alternative was to face how massively he might have just fucked up.

Probably things would be fine.

Inside, he found a sleepily blinking Adam and thanked fucking God for small miracles. Ronan climbed onto the edge of the bed and kissed Adam's tousled hair. The bleary gaze was an infinitely better image to occupy his mind than anything else about the morning.

But then the timing brought back his earlier thought, the one he’d refused to complete, so fast and unexpected that Ronan couldn’t shove it back.

_I will feel significantly better with an address,_ Jordan had said, exactly the same way Adam would start _I don’t understand why you’re upset_ right before his father struck a blow.

“Morning,” Adam murmured. Ronan forced himself to focus on the present, the now, Adam’s accent thickened by sleep and his body warm and his whole self safe. “Who was that?”

“No one important.” Ronan kissed his hair again. “Jesus, I'm fucking starving. You wanna order breakfast? I’ll pay.”

“Mm.” It was a testament either to how groggy or how hungry Adam was that he accepted the deflection. “Hashbrowns. Bacon. Gallon of orange juice.”

“Got it.” Ronan kissed his nose, extricated himself, and returned to the bedroom before Adam could notice that the phone he held wasn’t his own.

He found Hennessy curled into a defensive ball exactly where he’d left her. “Alright, I deserve an Olympic medal,” he said, tossing the phone in her direction. It landed on her blanketed side. “Coast is clear.”

She freed an arm, grabbed the mobile, and spent a solid minute looking at the screen. Ronan wasn’t sure what she was examining, since all he could see from this angle was a mass of dark hair outlined by an electronic halo.

When she’d finished whatever the fuck she was doing, she turned over to face him. “What did you say?”

Ronan sat down beside her. “Just told her what’s going on.”

“Thanks for the super detailed blow-by-blow.”

“You had the chance to listen. You kicked me out instead. I’m not a walking transcription service. Relax. It was chill.”

This did not mollify her. If anything, the words had the opposite effect. She grimaced, less angry than anxious. “You told her I wasn’t saying goodbye?" she demanded. "That I’m not driving off a bridge? That even though I'd be a beautiful corpse, I have not splattered my gorgeous self across the pavement?”

“Yeah.”

Ronan dug out his own phone to begin compiling a breakfast order, since he had to look at something besides Hennessy, and takeout currently felt like the only thing right in the world.

“She said she understood,” he lied. “Wasn’t fucking happy about it, but she got the message. She said she’d give you space until you’re ready.”

Hennessy cradled the phone tighter to her chest, like a stuffed animal or a long-lost precious heirloom. She looked so goddamn grateful that Ronan's guilt became a stabbing pain in his lungs. He focused harder on his phone screen, although he was having a hard time figuring out what any of the online menus said.

“Thank you,” Hennessy whispered.

For about the millionth time in the past week, Ronan was gifted with the divine knowledge that he was the worst person alive. He grunted, ignoring the thanks. “Parrish and Gansey are waking up. I’m getting food. Are you cool with sitting through a war council about what the fuck we're doing now?”

Hennessy pushed herself up. “First, I’m showering,” she said. Just like that, she sounded like herself again, the same way Gansey did after he’d solved a gnawing problem. “Find me a meal containing lamb. I don’t care if breakfast menus ‘don’t serve it.’ I must eat a baby animal. That is the fuel necessary to tolerate the war council.”

“Will do,” Ronan said, because it was a pretty reasonable request by her standards.

He exhaled, continuing to compile the breakfast order as she stalked out and commandeered the bathroom.

It was something, at least. It was moving forward. It was one less thing to haunt Hennessy at three in the morning. And as long as Hennessy thought that Jordan had found peace with the situation, that Jordan was okay, she had a reason to keep fighting.

Ronan just couldn’t ever tell her the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I PROMISE WE'RE GONNA GET TO THE EVENTUAL HAPPY ENDING TAG SOMEDAY I SWEAR


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> everyone gets mad at ronan, but at least his lying bullshit didn't become a multi-chapter agony

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> nobody is in any danger in this chapter, but there is a moment where jordan _thinks_ hennessy is in danger, which may be emotionally fraught.  
> otherwise, this chapter is relatively light on content warnings, aside from varying characters getting really mad

The war council convened on the couch mattress, since the rickety kitchen table was filled with unopened mail and incomprehensible months-old sticky notes. Adam showered and then found himself a seat by one of the armrests.

“Your face?” he asked. He hadn’t noticed the lines across Ronan’s cheek earlier, but now that he was conscious, the angry pink welts were difficult to ignore.

“Bad dreams,” Ronan said.

“I’m a violent bitch,” Hennessy added, although any bite was mitigated by the way she’d curled up with Ronan.

She’d positioned herself against his chest as he lounged near the other armrest. Her head nestled underneath his chin, her hands resting gently on his wrists, his arms hugged around her waist, his legs hugged around her hips. He’d folded himself over her in an affectionate manner usually reserved for Blue or Noah. Adam would normally expect an irritable response. But instead she was petting Ronan, just a little, idle and unconcerned. 

It was the gentlest Adam could ever remember seeing her.

Gansey finished maneuvering everyone’s respective breakfasts from takeout containers to plates, exiting the kitchen and serving each person like a deferential waiter. Ronan stuck his food on the armrest beside him and ate his hashbrowns with his fingers, while Hennessy shoved about four strips of bacon into her mouth at once. Adam stopped watching them just long enough to inhale his own breakfast.

Once the sounds of chomping, smacking, and swallowing had subsided, Gansey said, “Where should we start from, then? Plan-wise, I mean.”

“I’ve agreed not to eat a gun,” Hennessy said. “Extremely grudgingly, mind you.”

Adam rolled his eyes. “Great. Let’s all give a round of applause. Hooray, you’ve achieved the bare minimum. Now, beyond that?”

“I’m figuring it out,” Hennessy said.

Gansey tucked himself under Adam’s arm. “You must have friends,” he offered. “Family. Shouldn’t they have some involvement?”

"Not everybody has that kind of family, Gansey," Adam murmured.

Gansey winced. "That's my foot getting acquainted with my mouth."

“I don't have those kinds of friends. And I’m sort of trying to... minimize my collateral damage.” Hennessy bit down on the inside of her cheek. “But I’ve got a sister. I’m going to reach out, when I’m a little better.”

Ronan flinched. Adam wasn’t sure Gansey saw it, and he knew that Hennessy didn’t, given that Ronan’s face wasn’t in her field of view. But Adam noticed.

It was probably because of his brothers, Adam reasoned. But still odd.

“What about finances?” Gansey pressed. “If you need money to pay your rent-”

Adam elbowed him in the ribs.

“Ow.”

"Your foot," Adam said. "Your mouth."

“I’m doing fine where that’s concerned,” Hennessy replied, “although I’m far from opposed to a sugar daddy. Let’s talk allowances, pretty boy. How much contact do you require on a weekly basis if-”

“Yeah, okay, anyway. Are you a dealer?” Adam interrupted.

He asked because he knew that Gansey was too polite to do so, and because he knew that Ronan wouldn’t ask any questions with answers he didn’t want to know. Adam felt it was a reasonable query, considering she refused to offer her address, carried a veritable pharmacy around in her backpack, and paid her bar tabs with wads of 50 dollar bills. Someone here had to be the asshole with no sense of decorum. Adam didn't mind chewing on his own foot.

“Oh, what, I know where to find a good party, so I _must_ be slinging molly?”

Her offended expression did not move Adam. “Yeah.”

“I don’t deal drugs. Shit doesn’t interest me. If I’m risking criminal repercussions, you can be damn sure it's doing something baller. I’m not some mediocre fucking small-time retailer. I’m a counterfeiter. Art, mostly. Money orders and cash if I'm in a bind, but my studio hasn’t got the proper equipment for that right now. So just art, as far as you’re concerned.”

Adam turned this over. “I’d really prefer if you found a different career.”

“Tough shit.”

“How dangerous is it?” Ronan asked. “No bullshit.”

“Well, it’s illegal as fuck,” Hennessy said. “You come across the occasional dangerous client, too. But that’s true of any profession, legal ones included. I know how to get away with murder.”

“Do you?” Ronan pressed. “Or do you just not give a fuck about whether shit goes sideways?”

“Piss off.”

“Maybe we should come back to this,” Gansey said, swiftly intervening to avoid further deterioration. “What do you want, Hennessy?”

Her hackles had started to rise, although she hadn’t yet disentangled herself from Ronan. Adam noted the mistrustful way she eyed Gansey - cautious, catlike, not quite malevolent. “King of specifics, aren’t you?”

“It’s just,” Gansey said, “I’ve made the mistake of deciding what’s best for others before, and I don’t want to do that now. So I’m asking.”

“Aren’t you a fucking martyr,” she muttered.

“He’s got a point,” Adam said. “We can’t really plot a map forward if we don’t know the destination.”

Hennessy looked down at her hands, once again resting on Ronan’s. She’d settled back into him as soon as they’d both finished their breakfast. Her fingers anxiously curled, nails pressing little divots into Ronan’s skin.

“I just want to learn not to be a puddle of radioactive waste,” she said, “so I can go home and see my sister.”

Ronan flinched again. 

Adam narrowed his eyes. “Alright. That's fair. There’s recovery centers around here, you know. We could look for one.”

“I don’t have the greatest track record with inpatient programs.”

“Of course not.” Adam groaned, pressing his knuckles to his forehead. “You know none of us are therapists, right?”

Hennessy’s mouth twitched into a wry half-smile. “I had begun to suspect. I’m glad my hunch was correct. You’d be a godawful therapist.”

“I’m not comfortable functioning as the bridge between life and death here.”

“No one’s asking you to, Parrish,” Ronan snapped.

“I’m not comfortable with _you_ functioning as the bridge between life and death, either.”

“He’s not,” Hennessy said. “It won’t - I won’t let it go like that. I don’t want it like that.”

Adam did his best to catch Gansey’s eye, lighting a _help me out here_ distress beacon that he wasn’t trying particularly hard to hide. 

Gansey intercepted the signal and pressed a thumb against his bottom lip. “I don’t want to back you into a corner,” he said, careful, “and I don't believe an ultimatum is necessary at this juncture. But if the situation becomes toxic for Ronan, I _will_ ask you to find alternative means of getting help.”

Adam expected anger, like he'd expected irritation with Ronan's affection. He envisioned either a snarl or a return to her defensive annoyance - a sneer, a chilly laugh, an uncaring quip. Ronan certainly looked annoyed enough for both of them, glaring at Gansey over the top of Hennessy’s head, as though Gansey had said something unreasonable.

But Hennessy just let out a shaky breath and leaned over, holding her fist out. Adam frowned, perplexed. After an equally confused pause, Gansey bumped her knuckles, clearly unsure of whether this was her intention.

Hennessy dropped her arm, satisfied. “You’ll tell me, then, yeah?” she said. “You’ll tell me if I fuck it up? Because Lynch claims he will, but I suspect he’ll fail spectacularly to put his money where his mouth is.”

“Bullshit I will,” Ronan said.

“You probably will,” Adam replied. “But I sure as hell won’t.”

Hennessy eyed him with appreciation. She didn’t know Gansey all that well yet, but Adam was certain that he himself could make the sentiment trustworthy. Yeah, he’d tell her if she was hurting Ronan. That principle aligned with everything he’d done so far; he’d made his priorities abundantly clear.

“Okay,” she said. “Then that’s a start.”

-

Ronan found Adam working on his laptop a little while later, after Gansey had disappeared on a grocery run and Hennessy had sequestered herself on the balcony to smoke. She’d been sitting in one of the plastic chairs for long enough that Adam was positive she must have finished her first cigarette, but if she wanted to make her way through an entire pack, then so be it.

Adam scooted over, but Ronan didn’t sit. Concerned, Adam stood and touched Ronan’s cheek, gently, above his scratches. “Everything okay?”

“So I did something bad,” Ronan said.

In all of human history, Adam was sure that those words had _never_ begun a positive interaction. He dropped his hand. “Tell me.”

Ronan did. He explained the conversation he’d had with Hennessy’s sister, the way the talk had gone wrong, the way he’d _let_ the talk go wrong. He was more detailed than his usual musings, his wary gaze darting several times to the closed balcony door, his anxiety threaded through the stretched-taut tension of his voice.

Adam scrubbed a hand over his own face as Ronan finished his explanation. It wasn't the worst thing he could think of. At the very least, the situation didn't affect him. Still, it felt like a completely unnecessary mess, and he was irritated that Ronan had dropped it at his feet instead of letting him live in peace. “Oh, my God.”

“I know,” Ronan said. “I know. Fuck.”

“What the hell do you think is going to happen,” Adam asked, matching Ronan’s thin-strung tension, “when she calls Jordan to reconnect?”

“I wasn’t _thinking_ that far ahead.”

“No _shit._ Did you seriously lie to her? You seriously lied to her.”

“You lie to people all the time.”

“Oh, _don’t_ turn this around on me. My only fault here is that I should have seen this coming. You know that wise old proverb, ‘If it’s something Kavinsky would do, _don’t fucking do it?’”_

Ronan rocked back a step like Adam had hit him. Probably it would have surprised him less if Adam _had._ Kavinsky was off-limits conversational territory, an untouchable topic, a faux-forgotten memory. Adam and Ronan did not talk about Kavinsky. Adam didn’t invoke his name lightly now.

“It wasn’t-” Ronan started, and broke off under the force of Adam’s glower.

“What,” Adam said, pressing his advantage, “it wasn’t like that? It wasn’t like you were cutting her off from her family so she would have to stay with you? Because newsflash, Lynch, that’s _exactly_ what it’s gonna look like when she finds out.”

He wasn't angry for Hennessy's sake, really - he liked her well enough, but he didn't feel any need to defend her. And even this incensed, Adam knew the Kavinsky-esque explanation hadn’t been Ronan’s intention. He wanted Ronan to defend himself - _needed_ Ronan to offer a defense that worked. Adam himself couldn't think of any defensible reason for Ronan to do something so asinine. 

But Ronan just jerked back and turned in the direction of the bedroom. “Fucking forget it.”

“No, wait.” Adam grabbed his wrist. “Wait. Why didn’t you just give me the phone? I was up.”

Ronan didn’t try to shake himself free, although Adam's grip was loose enough to manage it. By the time Adam glanced furtively at the balcony door and back, Ronan’s furious expression had melted into something closer to bewilderment.

“I mean, I was tired,” Adam added, “but I was _up._ I could’ve talked to Jordan. You make me answer your calls all the time. Why the hell wouldn’t you do that today?”

“Why _didn’t_ I give you the phone?” Ronan echoed, sounding just as bewildered as he looked. “I... I didn’t... I didn’t think of it.”

“No _shit.”_

“But it technically solved everything, right?” Ronan pressed, a little desperate. “Hennessy’s happy, Jordan’s pissed, which means she’s not worried, everyone wins.”

Maybe that made sense to Ronan, whose anger offered a simple escape from any difficult feelings, but Adam knew how awful rage could feel. Especially rage that stemmed from a betrayal. His fondness for Hennessy was a still-budding thing, and he had exactly zero investment in Jordan’s happiness, and he wasn’t exactly a good person himself, and he _still_ wanted to throttle his boyfriend.

“I really,” Adam said, “don’t think you’re fully grasping how despicable you are.”

Ronan clenched his jaw. “Enlighten me, then.”

“You told me because you knew I wouldn’t care,” Adam hissed. He couldn’t tell whether he was more angry at Ronan, or at himself for being this predictable. There were endless versions of him who absorbed this idiocy with simple, mild annoyance. “You wanted me to _absolve_ you.”

Ronan kept his stormy gaze locked to Adam’s and didn’t reply. That was answer enough; there wouldn’t be any need for defensive posturing if Adam wasn't right. Ronan usually reserved this malevolent glare for strangers, which meant he betrayed himself. He didn’t look at Adam like this. The only reason he hadn't glanced away was to avoid an admission of guilt.

Another thought struck Adam, then, a clandestine heir to the first. 

“You’re making me _complicit,”_ he said.

“What.”

The anger was less pronounced, now, mostly because the game intrigued him. “Right, okay," Adam continued, "I lie for you, and then when the shit hits the fan, you only look _half_ guilty. I make a great scapegoat. Let’s be real, if one of us was gonna do something awful-”

“Fuck no,” Ronan snapped. “That’s not what this is.”

This denial just proved that Adam's first accusation had struck a bullseye. Ronan _had_ wanted Adam to alleviate his guilt. If Adam had been wrong about the conclusion, Ronan would have said so. But Adam did have to admit that a premeditated plot didn't fully explain the data.

It wasn’t because he was feeling particularly starry-eyed about Ronan’s good intentions or moral compass or bleeding heart or capacity for love. It was more that Adam knew Ronan, and he therefore knew that Ronan didn't have enough strategic prowess or calculation to pull the maneuver off. 

Sometimes it was much easier to believe in Ronan's stupidity than his goodness.

At least Ronan's stupidity could always be counted on.

"What do you want me to do?" Adam asked.

Ronan finally shifted his glower in the direction of the floor. "I don't fucking know."

So here the consequence was, thanks to Ronan's unflappable stupidity. And here Ronan was, somehow surprised by the outcome of his own stupid actions, as if this plot twist hadn’t been telegraphed from a thousand miles away.

Adam wondered, briefly, what it would be like to go through life with as little comprehension of cause-and-effect as Ronan did. Freeing, probably. Unpredictable. Aimless. 

Also awful.

"I'm gonna be real with you," Adam said. "I’m getting less and less sympathetic with every passing second."

"And you were so goddamn invested five minutes ago." 

Ronan didn't actually look that mad, snarl notwithstanding, which Adam suspected was because he knew he deserved the ire. Honestly, even taking into account Ronan's typical idiocy, this mistake wasn't like him. It was a bad sign. A foreboding omen etched scarlet against the sky.

"You're backsliding," Adam said.

If Adam had any doubts about that conclusion, they vanished at the change in Ronan's posture. Before, the fight had been winding to a close. Now, everything about the set of Ronan's mouth and the square of his shoulders indicated that Adam had questioned his honor. Everything Ronan-like about his face had iced over. 

Usually, Ronan defended his honor with fire and ferocity. That made the ice all the more disconcerting.

But when Ronan did speak, it wasn't with the viciousness Adam expected.

"I already dug the hole, man," he growled, and Adam recognized the rough undertone: pleading. "I dug the fucking hole and I buried myself in the dirt, just — I can't fucking _help_ her if she doesn't trust me."

Adam had a choice, here. He could keep Ronan’s secret. Not only that, but he could _also_ create a cover that prevented Hennessy from ever suspecting the guilty party. He could fix the fuckup in a way that saved the boyfriend he’d had for years - a man who owned a piece of his heart, a living reminder of the good in humanity, an idiot who’d clawed his way up Adam’s list of emotional priorities. He could pull the strings, transform the lies into scripted theater.

Or he could take the side of truth. He could decide that integrity mattered more than convenience. He could drag his moldering principles out from the dusty closet and brush them off for the first time in ages. He could dryly observe that Ronan's guilt was already eating him, and that the guilt would just worsen if Ronan didn't confess now, because Ronan was a godawful liar. He could convince Ronan to talk to his soulmate like a mature adult. He could offer his two cents and then walk away, just like he did for every situation that wasn't his goddamn problem.

Adam considered these possibilities and discovered that he was too angry for any of them. He knew the probable outcomes of each predictable path, and he knew that the predictable paths were the safest. But the anger pounded in his temples, and the whole situation tasted acrid, and he didn’t understand why he was this upset, and he didn't want to play cleanup crew for Ronan's fuckups, and he didn’t want to waste energy on crafting a lie, and most of all he didn't want to pretend that he wasn't upset.

So he carved a third option.

“Go to hell,” he said pleasantly. “Hennessy!”

Ronan pressed his knuckles to his forehead, closing his eyes. He made no move to stop Adam, which Adam supposed was to his credit. He just waited like a condemned prisoner facing the gallows.

Hennessy stepped into the living room, the shout drawing her from her balcony perch. Her movements were all lazy relaxation, but Adam didn’t miss the sharp glint of her eyes. “Where’s the fire?”

“You need to call your sister,” Adam said.

-

Hennessy’s mind did a peculiar thing: It forgot what was happening in real time.

She recalled only the vaguest impressions of Adam’s explanation, of Ronan’s gritted teeth, of the stomach-sinking knowledge that No-Lies-Allowed Lynch had played her. He’d played her, and she’d allowed it, even though she was supposed to be smarter than this. Even though she _was_ smarter than this. She knew that her mind was cognizant of what was happening, because she was aware of specific details that could only come from active listening. She also couldn’t remember being told those details at all.

Her full return to consciousness occurred after the altercation. She became aware of her body and her heartbeat and her rapid breath and her pounding head just in time to hear her voice say, “I’m getting out of here. I have to get out of here or I’m going to kill him. I’m going to kill him. I’m going to actually, literally kill him.”

She believed her voice when it said this. There was no reason for her autopilot function to lie.

Her backpack settled against her spine, because her body had apparently remembered to grab it. The door slammed, the hallway blurred, the elevator dinged. Hennessy’s next full-color impression was of an arm thrust through the closing lift. Adam Parrish stepped inside, unruffled and self-righteous and the last person she wanted to see.

“If you’re about to give me another ‘don’t leave’ speech,” Hennessy said, “I need to emphasize how literally I will kill him.”

“Nah. I needed out, too.” His voice was unusually strained, and when Hennessy glanced down, she discovered his hands formed into white-knuckled fists at his sides. Not so unruffled, then. “Can’t stay inside when I’m this mad. Always do things I regret. Anyway, here.”

He pressed something into her hand. She held it up to the light and discovered it was a key card.

“My spare,” he explained.

“I don’t think you understand how serious I am about my homicidal intentions. Look me in the eyes, Parrish. Accept responsibility for whatever bloodbath may come of this terrible, terrible decision.”

Adam looked her in the eyes. “All right. Responsibility accepted.”

It was hard to hold onto her momentum without anything to fight against. His lack of placation was probably more placating than anything else. As the elevator stopped in the building’s underground parking garage, Hennessy stepped out, and then she discovered she was shaking.

“I’m taking my bike and hitting the interstate,” Adam said. “Riding calms me down. I’ve got a spare helmet and a second seat if you want in.”

It wasn’t like Hennessy had another destination in mind. It wasn’t like Hennessy had anything against pedal-flooring joyrides, either, especially when her insides were on fire. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s go.”

-

They drove for about an hour along the first highway out of downtown. By the time Adam slowed, miles stretched between them and the city. He wasn’t exactly a reckless driver, but Hennessy could feel the agitation in the force of his stops and the sharp jolt of his turns. Arms hooked around his waist, chin by his shoulder, wind screaming around them like an eldritch god howling curses, she decided that Adam’s deceptively deferential exterior was good for at least one thing.

Driving might have a calming effect on Adam, but for Hennessy, the journey just allowed the acid to bubble in her veins. She’d watched a documentary once about divers with the bends. If they ascended too quickly after long periods below the surface, their veins fizzed like a pressurized soda bottle. The condition could be fatal. 

That was how Hennessy felt. With every new mile marker, she discovered another aspect of the situation that enraged her. She was pretty sure that on some emotional level, she was just plain _hurt,_ but she was also so fucking pissed that she couldn’t process anything around the fury.

Adam pulled off at a nondescript exit, entered a nondescript highway-based town, and guided the bike to a nondescript lot near a nondescript park. Then he got up and walked onto a nondescript trail, leaving Hennessy no choice but to follow.

She was so fucking angry.

She was so. Fucking. Angry.

After about five minutes, Adam wandered off the trail and onto a manicured patch of picnic-ready lawn. Hennessy stomped after him, her heels sinking a full inch into the wet mush, hobbling her stride.

“All right,” Adam said finally, turning to her. “Go off.”

She couldn’t have held back if she tried.

“I _don’t,”_ Hennessy snarled, “let people hurt my sister. Ever. I don’t fucking care what people do to me. I don’t fucking care about that. I don’t fucking care. Any sorry motherfucker who messes with her, though-”

She took a sharp breath. It had been a long time since she’d been this angry, angry enough to puke, angry enough to burn cities. Angry enough to point a barrel at her soulmate and make him beg and then pull the trigger anyway.

When she blinked through the swimmy haze of red, she found Adam studying her cannily. His head was tilted, his eyes narrowed in unwary assessment. Hennessy had no idea what had piqued his interest. Possibly the way that the fury had stripped her armor. Possibly the violent hand gestures she was making. Possibly the fact that his boyfriend commandeered a place of honor on her hit list.

It was a struggle to get her breathing under control. Once she’d managed a true inhale, she said, “What.”

“Nothing.” When she bared her teeth, Adam amended, “Nothing you’d want to hear.”

“Spit it out, Parrish.”

Adam shrugged and folded like wet tissue paper. He spoke carefully, like he gave a fuck about the word choice, but his tone lacked Jordan’s caution. Good. Good. If he acted like a prey animal, she’d become a predator faster than she could kill her instincts.

“Sometimes you just aren’t how I expect you to be,” he said. This meant absolutely fucking nothing to her, until he added, “You’re a lot more like Ronan than I first thought.”

Hennessy bit down on her fist and screamed. She kept it up until she felt a little less likely to strangle him, and then she plopped down on the wet grass with a thud.

“I did say you wouldn’t want to hear it,” Adam pointed out, mildly.

He sat beside her, despite the fact that his business-casual pants probably couldn’t abide the dew. Hennessy needed to call Jordan, but first she needed to make sure her head was screwed on straight, and right now her thoughts stormed with charring malevolence.

“What the actual hell and fuck,” she said, “is wrong with him.”

Adam made a noncommittal noise.

“It doesn’t even - I don’t even fucking _care_ that he trashed me!” She didn’t think that Adam needed the clarification, but apparently she herself did, if the bafflement in her voice was anything to go by. _“Fuck_ me. That means jack fucking shit to me. It means jack shit. So I’m a bitch, so he cemented my reputation, that’s fine, that’s me. That’s just me. But how could he fucking make her think-”

She ran out of words. Adam waited a polite ten seconds, then prompted, “Make her think what?”

Hennessy gripped the sides of her head. It helped her to feel a little less like her brain was going to explode due to rage-related pressure cooking. “That I don’t _care_ about her.”

“Not to quibble about phrasing here,” Adam said, “but I’m not really seeing how that’s any different from trashing you.”

Hennessy made an inarticulate noise of frustration and flipped him the bird. She didn’t fucking know _how_ it was different. She just knew it was. Because Jordan already knew that Hennessy was a toxic bitch, so more news there didn’t matter. Because despite this knowledge, Jordan had still been under the impression that Hennessy needed her. No - Jordan had still been under the impression that Hennessy _loved_ her. This was the one true thing in Hennessy’s life, her one centerpoint, her compass, her map across the stars, and Ronan had fucking ruined it.

Oh.

Hennessy paused, rewound, tested the thought again. Ronan had fucking ruined it. Her thorny soulmate, the pair of them snarled together, choking each other’s roots from the sunlight. He’d fucking ruined it.

Everything in her suddenly calmed.

It was like a bastard-walking-on-water calming-of-the-storms miracle inside her brain. Her blood pressure dropped with the swiftness of a thunder-scented cold front. Her breath eased. Her muscles relaxed, and she slumped, a marionette abandoned by its stiff-backed puppeteer. She could taste the air around them. Smell the grass. Hear the low chirp of crickets.

“I’m good now,” she said.

Adam gave her a look that plainly said he did not believe this. He didn’t argue, though, because he was a rational man with solid priorities who didn’t give a shit. Hennessy was so fucking glad of that. Pre-bike animosity aside, she couldn’t think of a single person she’d rather be sitting with. There was no need to explain herself or pull on a mask or worry about judgment: Adam was good company, a welcome reprieve from her solitary thoughts, and Adam also didn’t give a shit.

Hennessy did a vague examination of her mind to gauge whether anything appeared amiss, since this type of mood swing paired well with psychosis. But she really did feel calm. Not in a singsong spiraling-depression-and-trauma-repression way. She was just okay. 

She was okay.

Okay.

She called Jordan.

She didn’t move away from Adam. Given the way that he observed the world, she was pretty sure he’d listen in on her conversation. But she was equally sure that he wouldn’t spare precious energy on dissecting it.

Jordan didn’t pick up.

“Hello, I’ve sold my shares in the business of Letting People Speak for Me. Investment in that industry was a gargantuan goddamn mistake. I should have called you myself. I screwed up. I love you. Please talk to me.” She managed this voicemail, too, with surprising calm, and then took a minute to think.

The fact that she’d connected to the voicemail inbox indicated that Jordan hadn’t blocked her number - or gotten a new number herself. At least, that was what Hennessy hoped. How long did a voicemail keep working after the line was disconnected?

She held the phone against her chest. She closed her eyes. She called again.

Jordan didn’t pick up.

Hennessy called again.

After five rings, the line clicked, and then her sister’s groggy voice mumbled, “You’d better be dying.”

“I love you,” Hennessy said. "I'm sorry for fucking everything up."

There was a rustling noise, a clatter, some ambient background humming. Jordan’s voice became a hell of a lot sharper, clearer, the same way it did when she needed to talk her way out of trouble. “Tell me where you are. Please, please, please, tell me where you are. I’ll call an ambulance, I’m coming. I’m coming.”

“No, no, no, oh God, I’m fine. I’m fine, I swear to God.” Hennessy’s recently-calmed heart spiked, battering against her ribs. “I’m okay, I’m not injured, I didn’t take anything, I’m not near any ledges. Fuck. Jordan.”

The ambient background noise resolved into ragged breathing. “If you’re bullshitting me,” Jordan said, “if you’re bullshitting me, I won’t ever forgive you. I know you won’t care either way, but I swear to God, if you’re - if you’re hurt and you let me talk to you like - I won’t ever - I will _never_ forgive you.”

A lifelong grudge wouldn’t make a difference if Hennessy died today, but she supposed that this was all the leverage Jordan had left.

“I’m okay,” she said. She meant it to sound confident and condescending, but instead her voice became a tiny bird’s croak. It cracked completely when she added, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Another pause. Hennessy had spent an entire lifetime with Jordan, so it was easy to read the layers in Jordan’s answering tone. “All right,” Jordan said, all reckless confidence on the surface, all galloping wild desperation underneath. “Give me a tick.”

Hennessy thought Jordan would hang up, but the line remained open. Beside her, Adam frowned at the ground, his head tilted oddly in her direction. Probably to hear better, Hennessy remembered, and apparently sparing the concentration despite his distaste for her. So fucking much for not giving a shit.

“This really wasn’t how I meant to start the conversation,” she told Jordan. “Shocking development, I’m a dumbass. Sorry. What’s happening over there?”

“I’m sitting. I had to sit. Be right as rain in a moment. I’m on the kitchen floor. There’s a potential concept here of, ah, shifted perspective pieces - rooms in the house through the eyes of mice. Or houses of giants through human eyes. The viewer will have to interpret for themselves, as with any groundbreaking artwork. Academic debates will be held, pretentious students will pen meaningless theses. I’m lying down now.”

“So, the opposite of getting up.”

“I just got - confused. You woke me up mid-REM. Dregs won’t shake me loose. Need to orient myself on this mortal plane, reconcile your lack of impending doom.” A blustery little noise crackled through the speaker, like wind in a tunnel.

Hennessy closed her eyes. She swallowed. She swallowed again. She still had a blockage in her throat when she said, “You’re crying.”

“I’m crying,” Jordan confirmed. “Much better to ignore it, though. God only knows I cause enough trouble without the maudlin dramatics. So, you’re calling. You love me, apparently. Since you’re allegedly not at death’s door, I assume you need something?”

Hennessy laid back in the grass and stared up at the trees. Jordan’s lay-on-ground strategy was pretty solid, actually. Most of Jordan’s choices ended up being better than Hennessy’s, in the end.

“I suppose I’ll have to guess.” Jordan was clearly trying for humor, but the timing was ruined by the continued thickness of her voice. “You were targeted by a political leader from a small but economically ambitious country, and now you need someone with savings to pay your ransom? And right when you’d just managed to wash your hands of this sisterhood business, too. Truly unfortunate circumstances.”

“I really am sorry,” Hennessy said.

“For?”

“Everything.”

Jordan laughed and then coughed on a half-sob. “That doesn’t actually improve my confidence, as far as your safety is concerned.”

Hennessy couldn’t do this if Jordan interpreted every expression of sincerity as a death knell. There’d be no way to tell the truth, or to prove her feelings, or to make Jordan stop crying. She also couldn’t hang up, because Jordan would _definitely_ interpret that as a death knell.

Adam was still beside her, still sitting up, still listening. Hennessy scrabbled at the dirt with her free hand until she found his wrist. “Parrish,” she said, “help me.”

She didn’t need to clarify; Adam held his hand out for the phone. She sat up and gave it to him.

“Hey,” he said, impeccably polite. “I’m with your sister right now. I’m a friend of hers. We’re outside in a park. Very publicly visible, very uninjured. Adam Parrish. I think it’s the first Linkedin result on Google. Yeah, that’s the one. Yeah - yup. Yep, that’s me. I like that you already had a subscription to a background check service. Is that enough information? All right. I’m gonna put Hennessy back on.”

Hennessy took the phone back.

“I suppose he could have given me a fake ID,” Jordan informed her, “but it doesn’t matter much. Solid proof of life, as far as your immediate self is concerned. I like his accent.”

“So now we can chat without all the fucking hysterics, right?”

“Sure.” Jordan hummed. Hennessy was relieved to discover that the brief conversation with Adam had restored some equilibrium. “He doesn’t seem like your usual type. Not that I’m using dubiously legal research techniques to pull up his background information or anything.”

“He’s boring. It’s tragic. But I let a non-boring idiot talk to you earlier, and look how that ended up.”

“I think we communicated everything we needed to communicate.”

“No.” Hennessy’s fingers tightened on the phone, damp with sweat. “He fucking lied to you. I didn’t contact you to play the placating martyr. I wasn’t going out of my way to make you happy. Shit’s not my style.”

“So your reason for contact was...?”

“I-” Deflection and avoidance and irony hadn’t gotten her anywhere. If there was anyone in the world who understood Hennessy’s vulnerable side, it was Jordan. Hennessy just needed to push past her own mental hangups.

She willed her tongue to unglue.

“I really should get some more sleep,” Jordan said, gently, into the silence.

“No, wait. Wait, wait, wait. I called to say I’m gonna get better.”

She realized a second too late that in her haste, she’d forgotten to add the ‘and it won’t work’ qualification. But what-fucking-ever. This conversation was already a nightmare without bringing mortality debates into it.

Jordan’s latest pause was her most pronounced yet. “I’m happy for you.”

“No, I’m not - I -” 

Hennessy couldn’t tell whether she’d done the right or wrong thing by calling. Action became easier when her goal was to wound, to hurt, to destroy. Wounding by accident, when she’d been trying for reparations - that felt even worse than a year spent in isolation.

She had to get through this. “I’m not any better yet. I’m actually a fuck ton worse than when you last saw me. I know myself too well to appear on your doorstep like a belated gift from the stork. Trust me, I’m not someone you want in your home. But I -” She swallowed for what felt like the millionth time. “I’ll get there. I called to tell you I’ll get there. And then I’ll come home. I want to come home.” Despite herself, she’d ended up crying anyway, although that was probably okay, given the subject matter. At least tears sounded sincere. “I _want_ to come _home.”_

“And the people you’re with,” Jordan said, “they’re actually helping? They’re not waving wands and chanting in Latin and claiming to pull swords from stones?”

“If they don’t help me, I’ll get help somewhere else. I _want to come home.”_ Hennessy was surprised by the ferocity of it, this desire. She’d thought that she’d given up on any dreams of a future. But apparently this private yearning, this dull ache, remained a stubborn part of her - even while she told herself to discard such naive fantasies.

Jordan said, still very gently, “You can come home now. No reason you can’t seek help from here. The guest room is empty.”

“I think I’ll fuck it up.” Hennessy laughed, more dazed than bitter. “I think I’ll use you. Fall back into my old habits. Good intentions get my foot in the door, right, and then the poison’s in your cup. So much for laws of hospitality. I think I’ll fuck it up. It has to be - I have to know I won’t fuck it up.”

“Okay,” Jordan said with an audible exhale, an acquiescence just as careful as the rest of her speech. “That sounds reasonable enough. I’ll respect your wishes. Now, I know this doesn’t affect your current life plans, but you may be pleased to hear I’ve gotten better with boundaries.”

“Have you? Excellent. That shit’s still mystifying to me.”

“Practice got easier after you left. One of those five-minute meditation type deals. Little by little, build up the fortitude. Now I’m all kinds of well-adjusted. Basically a normal person.”

Hennessy sucked in a breath that was ragged enough to sound like a sob.

“Oh,” Jordan said, “should I not have - I didn’t think you’d be shocked by your departure as a catalyst for change. Sorry.”

“No,” Hennessy said, “no, fuck, I’m over the moon. Hell yes. Boundaries. Bunch of methodical therapy workbooks and healthy relationship diagrams, I love it. You’ve ascended past my own half-assed studies. Teach me, O Wise One.”

She’d reached a point of relief too powerful to express non-sarcastically. So things _had_ gotten better for Jordan since she’d left. So Hennessy _had_ removed a toxic presence from her sister’s life. So the year of martyred loneliness hadn’t been a complete fucking waste.

Thank God, thank God, thank God.

“Well,” Jordan said, “in certain relationships, people may set arbitrary and strange-sounding boundaries such as _not waking me up from a dead sleep.”_

“It’s the middle of the day. I’ve got no idea when you sleep. But yes, alright, noted for future reference. Annotated in my logbook.”

“Also, the arbitrary and strange boundary of _not_ texting once and then ghosting me for months.”

Hennessy nodded, pragmatic, like this was a business negotiation. Her heart squeezed in her chest. “No texts, then. No randomized needy bullshit. I can manage that.”

Jordan sighed, soft. “I don’t think that’s what I want.”

“Well,” Hennessy said, “these arbitrary and strange rules of communication can only be followed in so many ways. I’m avoiding loopholes. You’re welcome.”

“I can’t get random texts after months of silence,” Jordan said, “or random calls while I’m asleep, because that will induce a bout of deeply Victorian madness. I would also prefer that you not disappear without any way to ascertain your safety, because that also induces a bout of deeply Victorian madness.”

“I told you I’m not coming home yet.”

“I know. That wasn’t my intended proposal. But do you think -" Jordan's breath shuddered, the only thing belying her emotional investment. "Could we talk once a week or so? Once a month, even, if you’re sick of my dulcet tones. We’ll pick a time, set alarms. Thursdays at midnight, maybe? Assuming you’re still a night owl, that is. I know you abhor both schedules and any nasty C-word ending in ‘ommitment,’ but this is the best solution I’ve got.”

Oh. 

That was so reasonable that it seemed like an impossible fantasy. It was a cracked window allowing Jordan’s breath of fresh air back into Hennessy’s life. It was a shield protecting Jordan from Hennessy’s messes. It was a reason to keep time, a reason to wake up.

Hennessy must have been quiet for too long, because Jordan spoke again. “I’m about as fond of feeling pathetic as you are,” she said. “I’d rather _not_ be the needy bitch sister who keeps harshing your vibes. I tend to be less needy when I know you’re alive. And I won’t tolerate indulgent puppy petting.”

“Okay,” Hennessy said. “Thursdays, midnight. I’ll set an alarm.”

“Okay,” Jordan said. “There we go, then. That wasn’t so hard. All’s right in the world and I’m in desperate need of more shuteye. Be safe. I love you.”

She hung up before Hennessy could form a farewell.

As Hennessy carefully tapped the new alarm into her phone settings, her fingers trembling, Adam drew a knee to his chest. “That sounded okay,” he said, cautious, as though voicing a newly-formed and risky hypothesis. “Relatively non-murderous.”

“It was okay.” Hennessy sort of couldn’t believe how okay it was. “I want to hug you.”

“What?”

“I’m filled with rare positive affection and need to direct the energy somewhere.”

Adam raised his eyebrows. “All right, I guess.”

He was not particularly receptive to the way she draped herself around his shoulders, but she hadn’t expected him to be. She just held him for a second, hard, fierce. Then she pulled back. “Thank you.”

“For?”

For the bike ride, for easing Jordan’s nerves, for telling Hennessy the truth, for absorbing Hennessy’s anger, for being kind to her when he didn’t want to be, for being her friend when he didn’t have to be, for showing up to meet her even though she was nothing to him, for telling her he wished she was dead. All of it.

“Facilitating,” Hennessy said lightly.

_“I_ didn’t do this,” Adam said. “I was just pissed at Ronan. You fixed your relationship all by your damn self.” It might have been praise, although it seemed equally likely that he just wanted a return to shitty equilibrium.

“Ronan,” Hennessy echoed. “Now _there’s_ a problem in need of solving.”

“Unfortunately,” Adam said, “now that I’ve cooled off, I don’t think killing him is a viable option. Too many complications. Gansey and Blue and Noah would be sad. I’m not interested.”

Hennessy laughed, genuine and giddy. “Imagine how fucking sexy it would be if you were, though.”

“Also, I’m gonna be annoyed if _you_ kill him.”

“I won’t.” She still felt that inner sense of calm, the rightness of an epiphany following a chaotic existential episode. “I'll find creative methods to avenge myself.”

Adam’s mouth quirked. “See, ordinarily, that’d make me apprehensive as hell,” he said. “But I kinda think he’s earned whatever’s coming to him.”

“Anarchy. Betrayal. Drama. We’ve become unwitting allies against the tide of emotional wreckage. Soap opera stuff here, Parrish. Emmy-bait nonsense. I like it.”

Adam shook his head, scrubbing a hand over his face. “So just to confirm,” he said, “when we go home, you’re _not_ gonna shoot him.”

“Correct. We need him around for more Emmy-bait dramatics.”

“Or stab him.”

“Probably correct.”

“Or push him off the balcony.”

“Grudgingly correct.”

Adam shook his head again. Hennessy knew he still had to be angry, but his tiny grin seemed genuine. She thought they might now qualify as real friends, if they hadn't before. “All right. Then yeah, consider us allies.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know that chapters where people fight are stressful. hopefully the positive developments in this chapter will offset some of the stress


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ronan tries to figure out why he's been such a major fuckup lately  
> noah helps

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> whew, back again after another long pause! with another chapter that kicked my ass for several weeks. dealing with the nuances of ronan's Issues will certainly be a multi-chapter affair, but this one does begin to scratch the surface.
> 
> i must thank my friend justice for solidifying much of the noah canon for this verse!

After Hennessy and Adam exited, an implacable silence strangled the apartment. It was the quiet of a deadened world. It was the emptiness of an ash-scorched battlefield. It was a living creature that nudged affectionately against Ronan’s hands, before sinking teeth into the soft skin instead.

Ronan sat down on the couch. The ringing in his ears and angry buzzing in his head didn’t belie anything good. A half-second examination of his insides revealed a moldering cavern where lungs were supposed to breathe. The spores of black poison wanted to shut down everything else, too - would, if they had their way.

He couldn’t deal with that right now. Right now, he needed to deal with the situation at hand, which was that he’d fucked up, and therefore had released all rights to emotional comfort. This was Adam’s space more than his, and if Ronan was going to lose his fucking shit, he sure as hell couldn’t do it in Adam’s space.

This didn’t calm him or make him feel better. But it was something he needed to handle. The time for shitty teenage behavior was long past; Ronan was an adult, and the least he could do was act like it.

If he was a truly _adjusted_ adult, he could have put aside the feelings entirely. Plotted out what to do and say to defuse Adam and Hennessy’s respective furies. But he was not currently okay, and he did not think he could pretend to be okay, so he did the next best thing and got the fuck out of dodge.

He booked a shitty motel room. There was no reason not to spring for a place _without_ hair in the shower drain, except that he didn’t want to. So he wasn’t like Gansey or Adam or Blue with their “personal standards” and “attention to hygiene.” So he was just this shitty, self-destructing person. So fucking what? Like it fucking mattered.

He made the ninety-minute trek to the place on foot. It was only upon arrival that he realized he hadn’t brought clothes, or deodorant, or shaving razors, or a toothbrush, or basically anything necessary for human existence.

This felt like a problem for Future Ronan, so he entered his room from the cracked sidewalk and closed the door. Old paint peeled thinly from the walls. Twin beds were made with fairly comfortable-looking quilts, a minifridge and television pushed against the wall opposite them. A vanity at the end of the room boasted a sink and several hand towels, a half-ajar door to the left opening into the bathroom.

Ronan laid down on the bed, turned off his phone, and closed his eyes.

Adam had done him a favor, he knew. He knew that. He knew that this wasn’t forgivable, and Hennessy would be more badly hurt if the deception lingered. Adam had every right to be angry with Ronan for using him. Hennessy had every right to be angry with Ronan for lying. Especially after he’d told her he _didn’t fucking do that._

He managed to work through this much of the emotional tangle before he couldn’t progress further. Every attempt to label his feelings or motivations or _what the fuck_ left him so sick he could barely move, a snarl of physical illness, more moldering rot reaching tendrils through his open chest cavity.

So he laid there with his eyes closed. He laid very still. He did not sleep, and he did not move. He floated carefully above the surface of his mind and just let the time slip past.

A sharp knock at the door startled him from the reverie. Ronan jolted upward, a half-guilty reflex, and was disconcerted to discover that night had somehow fallen around him. He shuffled to the door and opened it, squinting against the anemic lights illuminating the parking lot.

The Pig sat on the curb outside, eyeing him with dispassionate irritation. It still looked fucking incredible in the flickering white-blue glow, as though the fluorescence revealed hidden highlights in the paint.

The presumable driver of the Pig stood in front of Ronan. Gansey’s jaw was set, his teeth clenched. Ronan registered that Gansey appeared to be alone, and then he registered that Gansey was furious, just a half-second before Gansey punched him.

It was a solid hit in the ribs, impressive in both force and aim. The kind of punch someone threw to make a point. Ronan wheezed, delicately, and gripped the side of the doorframe so he wouldn’t slide to a knee. “Thumb outside your fist and everything,” he managed.

There were a lot of reasons that this might be happening. Ronan considered the possibility of a nightmare or hallucination, and then decided that the real Gansey was far more likely to really be pissed at him.

“I,” Gansey said, and paused, and collected himself, “told myself that I would deck you once I found you safe. The thought kept me going for most of the afternoon. But I don’t feel much better having done it.”

“You could hit me again,” Ronan suggested. “Sometimes you gotta really whale on someone before the violence feels good.”

For a second, Gansey looked as though he might do just that. He held himself still, as still as Ronan had been a few minutes ago, and his face was beautiful and cold and remote. Even with the lights casting him in half-silhouette, Ronan saw the fire in his eyes. Illuminated fuse. Burning fury.

Ronan didn’t think he’d ever been the _recipient_ of this Gansey’s rage. This Gansey was a glorious and poised and fiercely-intentioned creature who could mete out vindictive justice while Ronan observed, amused, lazily satisfied. This Gansey was never angry _with_ Ronan.

Was he angry on Adam’s behalf? Angry on Hennessy’s?

“What the hell are you doing here, man?” Ronan asked.

“Making sure there isn’t a body in this room.”

Ronan blinked. Zero part of that statement made any sense, unless Gansey thought he’d truly gone off the rails and killed a hooker or something. “How’d you find me?”

There was a stomach-swooping moment in which he wondered whether he’d called Gansey himself, sometime during his Mattress Laying Marathon, and dissociated hard enough to forget. If that was the case, he didn’t know what he’d _done,_ let alone how to atone for it. Or maybe he’d scrawled a note at the apartment, somewhere between booking the room and pulling on a sweatshirt. Or maybe Gansey had installed a GPS tracker on Ronan’s phone like an anxious parent who couldn’t give their kid any fucking space.

“I called your credit card company,” Gansey said, “to report concerns about fraudulent activity. They read me your last three charges, one of which was this room.”

Instead of clarifying anything, this just confused Ronan further. “Did you get my card cancelled?” he snapped.

“No, I said everything appeared correct.”

“How the hell did you-”

“The number is saved on our takeout delivery account, I know your social, and it’s not difficult to be decent to customer service representatives on the phone. I bribed the desk clerk upon arrival, which was crass, but better than banging on doors individually.”

Ronan felt the betrayal was rather unsporting of the desk clerk. At least Gansey wasn’t some vindictive stalking ex, he supposed. Mostly, though, he found himself faintly impressed. Half-amused. “You’re a terrible person,” he said, in the same tone that Gansey might tell Adam, _You’re a genius._ “How long’s it been since you committed white collar crime? Did you really want to spice up your night, or-”

Gansey grabbed Ronan’s upper arms and pushed him into the motel room. Ronan stumbled over his own feet, half-flailing backward. “What-”

“I called you for the entire afternoon!” Gansey snarled. “You _left me_ to spend _hours_ wondering where you were-”

“Whoa, hey, what-”

“-and you don’t - you don’t care. Of course you don’t care.” Fury seemingly spent just as fast as it had appeared, Gansey released his grip and stepped back. As Ronan steadied himself against the TV stand, Gansey pressed two fingers to his temple, his mouth parted and his eyes tired and his whole body defeated, and Ronan’s heart collapsed.

“No,” Ronan said, reaching toward him, “no, hey, what the fuck, I just turned my phone off. I do that all the time, you know I do that. Gansey.”

“I know. I know you do that. I knew you were fine.”

“You know me. You know I don’t - I wouldn’t - what the hell is happening here?”

“I knew you were fine,” Gansey repeated, his tension a slowly elongating rubber band. “I knew that. In my head, I knew that. But you also disappeared and became unreachable after a fight with not just one but _two_ partners, and you’ve been having a hard time lately, and I - I.”

Ronan caught Gansey up in his arms, unable to think of anything else to do, pressing Gansey’s face into his shoulder. His fingers twined hard in Gansey’s hair. “No, it wasn’t like that,” he said. “I swear, I swear, I was just trying to give them space and I didn’t want to talk to anyone and-”

“And you don’t ever think about anyone except yourself. I know.”

“That’s not fair.”

It might be fair, actually. Ronan protested more because he didn’t _want_ it to be than because he believed his own words. He’d thought of the others just long enough to find a faraway detonation site, so no one would get impaled on his shrapnel, and then he’d stopped thinking about anything except losing his mind.

Gansey breathed, sharply, twice. He knotted his fingers in Ronan’s sweatshirt and squeezed. Then he stepped back, his expression smooth and just the right amount of concerned, everything real hidden somewhere Ronan no longer had permission to access. “You’re right,” he said. “That’s not fair. I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t think about how it would look,” Ronan said. “I just needed to get out. Okay?”

The unhappiness in Gansey’s face was equal parts alien and too familiar. Alien because this wasn’t them, not anymore, not with each of them partly settled into adulthood and years of history at their fingertips. Too familiar because this was young Gansey, aching Gansey, desperate Gansey, surveying a drunk or bloody or high Ronan like a tragedy he couldn’t unwrite.

“Okay,” Gansey said. “I’m going to go home.”

“You could stay,” Ronan offered, swift and too eager. _Look, see, I’m not pushing you away, I’ll talk, I’ll fix it, I’ll prove you can go to sleep without worrying I’ll be dead when you wake up._ “There’s two beds.”

“I’d like to be alone. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

Ronan’s reply came out a rasp, rattling his dry throat. “Got it. Okay. Well. Sleep tight.”

Gansey sighed and stepped back again, through the door and onto the sidewalk. That was when a new voice sounded, somewhere to Gansey’s left.

“Do you guys want me to pretend I didn’t hear any of that? Because we can decide I got here right now instead of, like, three minutes ago.”

Ronan shifted to look. He found the new arrival peering around the doorframe, like he’d been tucked just out of sight, like an eavesdropping bastard, like a slouchy wraith, like a ghost who somehow always knew the right moment to make an entrance.

This was one tick too far. Ronan tried to sit and misjudged the distance between him and the bed - he barely brushed the edge, and then he slid down spectacularly to collapse on his ass on the stained carpeting.

“Noah,” he said, like everything was fine. “Hey.”

-

Gansey departed, but Noah stayed.

While Ronan was still shaking off the dreamy haze on his self-appointed floor perch, Noah turned on the lamp between the beds, the lights above the vanity, and the fixture above the television. This task accomplished, he dropped a giant plastic bag he’d been lugging onto one of the mattresses, and then he upended it. Dollar store spoils spilled out: a cadre of snack boxes, about a dozen king size candy bars, a ten-pack of industrial-grade energy drinks, a few toothbrushes, travel-sized toothpaste, floss, deodorant, shampoo, a six-pack of fluorescent soda.

Ronan pulled himself onto the bed and rubbed his eyes. Noah sported an unfamiliar purple t-shirt that, upon closer inspection, advertised some tourist trap cave system in Arkansas. His plaid pajama pants, on the other hand, were a threadbare pair that Ronan was pretty sure he’d had since they’d lived together in Monmouth.

This sight, the combination of the new with the old, loosened something tight in his chest. The pajamas proved Noah was still _Noah_ rather than some doppelganger, and the shirt proved Ronan wasn’t yet crazy enough to be reliving old memories.

“Do we need anything else?” Noah asked. “Because I tried to grab, like, all the major food groups, and then extra strong toothpaste because of all the cavities we’re gonna get. But there’s a gas station a two-minute walk away.”

Ronan shrugged a shoulder.

“Sweet.” Noah piled the drinks into his arms and swept over to the minifridge. Getting them arranged inside was a process that involved a lot of rummaging and, at one point, muffled un-Noah-like cursing.

“How’s Tetris going over there?” Ronan asked.

“Better than if there was a bunch of beer in here,” Noah answered, partially obscured by the open and rattling door of the fridge. “Which isn’t saying much.”

“I’m not drinking,” Ronan said. “Dude. Did you buy lethal amounts of caffeine so you could check? You can just _ask_ me.”

“I think you might be mistaking me for someone who, like, tries to be subtle.” With a final shove and a crow of satisfaction, Noah shut the door. He turned and pressed his back against it, sitting on the floor as he watched Ronan. “Me mentioning beer, see, that’s an opening. Which you get to take however you want. Your chosen path is apparently ‘being touchy.’”

“I’m not as wrecked as you and Gansey think I am,” Ronan said, frowning. “He made you come here and fuck up your trip?”

“I was only four hours away this morning. I’d _planned_ to drop in tomorrow, and then Gansey called me. So basically I’m psychic.” Noah smiled. “Aside from being totally out of the loop.”

Just one more transgression. Adam, Hennessy, Gansey, and Noah, each with their own valid reason for fury. All Ronan needed now was to piss Blue off, and he’d have a verifiable Yahtzee. “I didn’t feel like getting into it.”

“You’ve sent me, like, thirty memes in the past week,” Noah said. “I’ve sent you four different videos of Sims Youtubers committing digital war crimes.”

“They were good videos,” Ronan said. “I liked the one with the dude who stole all the neighborhood dogs and trained them to attack their old owners.”

“Yeah, see, I thought of you!” Noah’s smile brightened, although his eyes were sharp. He had this way of assessing people that couldn’t be replicated by any of Ronan’s other People. He didn’t exude Gansey-pity or Adam-calculation or Blue-irritation. He just evaluated what was in front of him without ever losing the laid-back neutrality. Ronan had never figured out how he managed it.

“And then Gansey called you asking you to come,” Ronan said.

“He didn’t ask. I made the decision all by myself, like someone who pays for his own car insurance and everything. What’s going on, man?”

Ronan wasn’t sure what kind of explanation Noah wanted. He erred on the side of caution and assumed that Noah, though the most relaxed person he’d ever met, might be nursing righteous indignation about being slighted. “I didn’t want to mope at you,” he said. “I had the emotional support front covered already.”

“You did?”

“Well. Until I fucked everything up forever, yeah.”

Noah made a ‘hmm’ sound.

“Just tell me what Gansey told you.”

“I’m basically playing a shitty game of Telephone. He told me that Adam and Hennessy told _him_ that you’re in the doghouse. Oh, and he told me who Hennessy is.”

“Have you met her?”

“Not yet. Haven’t talked to Adam, either.”

“You might want to do that,” Ronan said. “I don’t think it’s gonna be hard to pick sides with this one.”

Noah stood up, unfolding his limbs with a catlike stretch. He hopped onto the opposite bed and sat crosslegged, continuing to scrutinize Ronan, contemplative.

“Seriously,” Ronan said. “I’m not being self-deprecating here. I have honest-to-God bonafide fucked everyone over. You’re gonna get in trouble for fraternizing with the enemy.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“I’m trying to save your ass.”

“When Adam’s mad at you,” Noah said, measured and considering, “he tends to prefer that other people _not_ be mad at you. Since that way you have other people to vent to, and he doesn’t have to stop being mad early.”

“He’s never been mad at me like this.”

“I am positive he’s been mad at you like this. Just not for a while.”

“I won’t die if you decide to peace out.”

“Why are you trying to get rid of me?”

Ronan glowered and snatched a candy bar up at random, unpeeling the wrapper. It was a Kitkat. He bit into it with zero regard for the candy’s pre-portions. “I’m not.”

“Okay.” Noah shifted, tucking his feet under himself. “I think one of those Youtubers just put up a Minecraft war crimes video. I don’t know how to do war crimes in Minecraft. I want to find out.”

“Go for it. I think I’m gonna go to sleep.”

“You could watch with me.”

“I’m tired.”

“We could get smashed. You want to get smashed?”

Ronan frowned, examining the statement, trying to find the intention behind it. Mockery wasn’t really Noah’s style, and neither was point-proving mindfuckery. Ronan knew that if Noah had found him in an alcoholic stupor, he’d have stayed just as loyally as he was now. Ronan knew that if he asked, Noah would load a bag with shitty gas station booze, and he’d let both of them get as drunk as they wanted, and he’d decide that consequences were for their future selves. There had been a time when Ronan thought, with equal parts derision and protectiveness, that this was a mark of spineless cowardice.

These days, he thought maybe it was the best way Noah knew to keep him safe.

“I want to get so fucking drunk I feel like someone stranded me in the desert with the flu,” Ronan said. “But, you know, desire’s temporary and what-fucking-ever. Ride the wave.”

“Probably a good call,” Noah agreed. “You’d have to stay drunk forever to keep it from sucking. Hangovers are the worst.”

“You’re making a really good case for why I should throw in the towel and trash whatever’s left of my liver.”

“Okay,” Noah said, “next time you get smashed, do _not_ go, ‘Wow, Noah was so wise and learned to say that I need to be drunk forever.’ You never listen to anything I say. Sometimes I just say words to see what happens and, usually, the answer is nothing. It’s all radio static in here.”

A not-insignificant part of Ronan unwound at the inevitability of the statement. ‘Next time’ as opposed to ‘if.’ According to the Noah School of Logic, it was a statistical certainty that Ronan would, at some future point, make an unbelievably stupid choice. Ronan didn’t think that anyone except Noah could express this without incensing him. From Gansey, the sentiment would be resigned; from Adam, condescending; from Blue, exasperated. Noah, on the other hand, didn’t attach any judgment. Ronan would make messes for as long as he lived, on account of being Ronan, and then he’d put himself back together, also on account of being Ronan. There was no way to live down to Noah’s expectations when Noah’s expectations seemed fairly reasonable.

That was freeing.

He consolidated the dollar store shit into a pile, like a toiletry-laden trick-or-treat haul. Once it was arranged safely in the middle of the bed, he pushed his way under the covers, turning onto his side to face Noah. A tiny mountain of displaced granola bars cascaded over his hip.

“I think I’m going to fucking pieces,” he said.

Noah scooted up toward the headboard of his respective bed. “No offense,” he said, “but you’re definitely going to fucking pieces.”

Ronan laughed; he couldn’t help it. “Noah’s rude now,” he observed.

“I’m rude now,” Noah confirmed, bright.

“I wanna point out, though,” Ronan said, “that you've seen me _so_ much worse than this. So basically this is nothing.”

“I wanna point out,” Noah replied, in the tone of a first-time debate team member finding their footing for a rebuttal, “that you’re a _mess.”_

“Are you about to psychoanalyze me?”

“No. You’re all defensive. You’ll escape by running out all the hot water in the terrifying shower and then, uh, give me the silent treatment for the whole night.”

Depending on the flavor of the psychoanalysis, Ronan did not doubt this assessment. He reached out and flicked off the lamp between them so that he could get a better look at Noah’s face, the glare no longer washing out the details. Gansey’s soul mark shimmered against Noah’s cheek. 

“Do you know why I’m fucking everyone over?” Ronan asked.

Noah frowned.

“No, I mean, serious question. I’m not gonna spit at you. If you have any idea, I’ll eat the psychoanalysis for breakfast. Tell me how to stop fucking up.”

“You get stupid when you’re angry?” Noah suggested.

“If _that_ was the issue, I’d have fixed it already.”

“You get stupid when you’re stressed out?”

“Closer, probably.”

A silence fell. Ronan punctuated it by eating the rest of his candy bar, concentrating hard on the task to avoid looking at Noah.

“You didn’t remember to tell Gansey where you were,” Noah said. “Or me.”

“I had other shit on my mind.”

“You don’t usually forget.”

Ronan didn’t have anything helpful to say to that. Noah added, gentle, “But you used to.”

There it fucking was. Adam had accused him of backsliding; Gansey had raised the same concerns; Hennessy had diagnosed herself the cause of Ronan’s renewed nightmares. Now here was Noah, leveling the accusations in a softer voice, his case more difficult to refute because so much of it remained unspoken.

It didn’t make fucking _sense._ Even if the Hennessy situation _had_ brought up unpleasant feelings surrounding Kavinsky’s death, there was no reason for that to affect Ronan’s _behavior._ People didn’t just unlearn years of Adult Coping Skills because they remembered one thing that had sucked years ago. People didn’t just fall apart the way Ronan was falling apart.

But there was this truth, too: He knew who he was, and it was not this person. His real self would never have let Jordan believe Hennessy hated her. Hell, even barring that, his real self would have thought to hand Adam the fucking _phone._ His real self wouldn’t have hidden the transgression, possibly out of principle and possibly because his real self could follow lines of logic far enough to gauge when the future would go to shit. His real self wouldn’t have sought Adam’s absolution, as if that wasn’t the most manipulative and cowardly thing he’d ever done in his life. His real self didn’t _need_ Adam’s absolution, because his real self didn’t do stupid shit that made him feel guilty enough to throw up.

His real self didn’t lie to people he’d promised not to lie to.

His real self didn’t leave worried loved ones to call his phone for hours, terrified that he was dead.

His real self looked a lot less like Hennessy than this current self did. And a good fucking thing, too, because Ronan at his worst and Hennessy at her worst would kill each other. He had to be the one who’d healed. He had to be the one who knew what he was doing. He had to be the one who could use his bullshit tragic backstory to drag other sad bastards back into the sunlight, or what-fucking-ever.

He didn’t have time to go to fucking pieces. He had too much to do.

“Maybe you’re forgetting you can ask for help,” Noah said. “Since things were different the last time you did this - I mean, the suicidal partner thing. Maybe you’re just trying to do everything the way you did the first time.”

“Noah.”

“‘Cause from what I’ve heard, it seems like eighty percent of the issues go away when you remember to _talk_ to people-”

“Noah.”

“-and you’re not helping anyone all that much when-”

“Noah, I need you to stop.”

Noah shut up.

Ronan’s head was an out-of-tune orchestra. A cacophony of off-beat instruments slammed against the inside of his skull, eliminating any cohesive thought. He pressed his knuckles to his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut, tiny pinpricks of sweat blooming on his neck, the urge to puke unbearable. Oh, God. He didn’t think he could make it to the bathroom from here, and he didn’t want to leave a vomit-spattered room for the housekeeping staff.

Noah’s cool fingers pressed against Ronan’s cheek. He must have gotten up, though Ronan didn’t open his eyes to look. “You’re awake,” Noah said. “Hey, you’re awake, you’re here, you’re with me, the beds probably have bedbugs, everything’s okay. Except for the bedbugs.”

“She’s not Kavinsky,” Ronan said.

“I believe you.”

“She’s not. She - oh, God, bring me the bathroom trash can.”

Noah did, with impressively quick pattering of feet to and from the other side of the room. As soon as Ronan had the bin in hand, he made a nauseous spectacle of himself spitting his mostly-empty stomach contents into the plastic bag, and then retched a couple more times for good measure, and then laid his head on the pillow feeling like someone on day three of withdrawal after a decade of binge drinking.

“I’ll get some water,” Noah said. “So you can rinse your mouth.”

A non-disgusting mouth wasn’t high on Ronan’s priorities list, but when Noah returned, he swished the small disposable cupful of water around and then spat it into the extremely disgusting trash bag.

Maybe, Ronan thought with no small amount of hope, he actually did have the flu, and the sudden influx of Crazy would dissipate after it ran its course.

“She’s not him,” Ronan said.

“I know.”

Ronan couldn’t quite understand why comparing Hennessy to Kavinsky was turning his organs inside out, especially considering everyone around him had been doing it since day fucking one, but in any case, he dry heaved twice more before he managed to articulate anything else. The whole process was so fucking gross and unnecessary - clearly there was no poison left for his body to purge.

“She gives a fuck,” Ronan said.

“Okay.”

“She doesn’t _want_ this.” Here, Ronan thought he may have pinpointed the root of the sickness, or at least landed in the general neighborhood. “She doesn’t want any of it, man, _fuck._ She’s a decent goddamn person. She doesn’t want to fuck with anyone’s life or own anyone or be owned by anyone or need anyone or deal with any of this, this horseshit, she’s not-” He paused to heave again. His whole body was shaking, now, teeth chattering, held in place only by the sterile quilt tucked around the bedframe. “She’s not Kavinsky.”

Ronan had only the briefest visual impression of Noah’s movement, and then Noah climbed into the bed behind him, hugging him around the chest. A few more dollar store items pattered onto the ground. “That’s kinda good news,” Noah said, nuzzling against the back of Ronan’s neck, “because I did not particularly like that guy.”

“And all you fuckers have been so busy worrying that this dumbass suicidal chick is gonna fuck me up that you haven’t-” He had to pause again, to catch his breath, though this time he didn’t throw up. He wasn’t sure whether that was an improvement. “You’ve never given a fuck about the shit I did to him. About how I was bad for him. And now none of you give a fuck if _I’m_ the one who hurts _her.”_

Except Adam. Adam gave a fuck. Ronan could remember the look on his face, the fury clear as cloudless skies, the darker rage underneath as he spat, _If it’s something Kavinsky would do..._ Though he might pride himself on his callousness, Adam didn’t fuck with people who didn’t care about consequences. He hated every recklessly-endangering dipshit ruining lives for fun, because he hated people who believed they could get something for nothing, and he hated people who got away with it even more.

“Oh,” Noah said, and hugged Ronan tighter.

“I’m fucking everything up.”

“Okay.” Noah pressed a tiny, soothing kiss to the back of his neck. “I’m not sure how much of your premise I agree with, here, but okay. I get you.”

“Tell me how to fix it.”

“Still a little above my pay grade.” Noah sighed. “I’ll talk to Gansey. And Adam.”

“Don’t make excuses for me.”

“I won’t. I will tell them where your head’s at in very non-excusing tones. If you want, I can, like, emphasize that you’re secretly a dick. To make sure they don’t end up with any secret sympathies.”

“When you meet her,” Ronan said, “I don’t want you in my corner. I don’t want you telling her what the fuck is wrong with me, I don’t - I want you to be a non-shitty person who doesn’t talk about me at all.”

“Okay. I can do that.”

“I’m not good for her just because she’s my soulmate. Soulmates are fucked up. Conceptually. Scientifically.” Ronan closed his eyes. “Fuck. Fuck everything. I need to sleep.”

“Can I stay?”

“Please.”

So Ronan finally surrendered to unconsciousness with Noah’s soft embrace to ground him, the quilt pinning him to the mattress like a fly against flypaper, abandoned snacks scattered across the blankets.

He still had no idea how to face the next morning.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hennessy shows adam her studio

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> one step closer to these dumbass idiots working out their shit

Before Adam and Hennessy left the park, Adam received a polite text from Gansey asking after Ronan’s whereabouts. “Gone to ground,” he said aloud, snorting, and called Gansey to get him up to speed. Hennessy added less-than-helpful commentary, shouting her side whenever Adam’s apparently lacked enough vitriol.

As Adam ended the call and stowed the phone in his jacket, Hennessy stood. “I suppose you’ll need to return to your better half.”

“I’m kinda okay with Ronan staying in whatever hole he’s crawled into.”

“I meant Gansey. You know, your _actual_ better half.”

It took a startled second for Adam to process that she thought Gansey was his soulmate. “Gansey and I aren’t - he's not - why would you think that?”

“You aren’t? He looks at you in the most nauseating way possible. But fine, teach me to make assumptions.” Hennessy shrugged. “Which is it in actuality, then? Noah or Blue?”

Adam couldn’t quite grasp what she was asking. “Did Ronan tell you I’m bonded to one of them?”

He couldn’t think of any reason for Ronan to do so, but Ronan’s behavior had been erratic enough lately that he couldn’t discard the possibility. It felt like a big leap for Hennessy to make without any outside influence.

“No,” said Hennessy. “But it’s my only explanation for why someone like you would tolerate someone like him. Brainrot thanks to soulmate proximity. Not that I’m judging. If I survive this without Lynch’s blood on my hands, I expect I’ll end up fond of Gansey. I’m already in mourning about it.”

“Everyone ends up fond of Gansey,” Adam said. “You aren’t special.”

“That’s even worse. Trust me to be _derivative.”_

Adam stood up himself, stretching. “I’m not bonded to any of them.” After a pause, in which his heart began a nauseous gallop against his ribs, he added, “I don’t have any soulmates.”

He knew that his lack of visible marks alone wasn’t enough to rouse suspicion. Plenty of people had soul marks that were hidden by clothing. That was more common than lacking soulmates entirely. For strangers to know about Adam’s circumstances, he needed to tell them himself - or someone else needed to spill his secrets.

He’d gone through different phases in his youth: defiantly telling anyone who asked and daring them to pity him, lying to blend more easily with his peers, affecting an air of amused mystery as he tried to ooze _This isn’t any of your damn business._

So he’d had every possible version of this conversation. These days, he didn’t tell people often. None of his coworkers were aware, and he’d let them assume he belonged to Ronan without any real protest. He didn’t have the emotional energy to weather the awkwardness. And if he remained private about his affairs, he wouldn’t have to do careful mental calculations to determine who was likely to be a dick.

Hennessy would find out sooner or later, though, if she stayed. Adam already knew she was a dick. Her pointless nastiness wasn’t going to wound him.

Instead of mocking him the way he expected, she just frowned. “Truly?”

“Truly.”

“Huh.”

Adam left the interaction open so she could get the asinine commentary out of her system. But she absorbed the information quietly, her gaze distant and pensive. This unsettled him. He hadn’t prepared for a timeline in which she gave a shit, and he couldn’t imagine her doing anything good with the knowledge.

“Take me home,” Hennessy said finally. “I'll give you the address.”

-

Adam parked the bike on an overgrown lawn that must once have been a status symbol. It didn’t appear to serve any purpose except to remind others that the property owner had enough money to buy copious land near downtown. Whoever had originally owned the place had given it up rather than continuing to pay someone to garden, so native vegetation had swept across the greenery and choked the grasses under waist-high wildflowers.

The grounds were edged by once-pruned trees, affording a thin screen of privacy and the illusion of remoteness. The long driveway completed the look. Adam couldn’t park on the asphalt because there were about seven other cars haphazardly crowding the area. They ranged widely in their models and price points, as though the people here came from every possible socioeconomic background. Hennessy did not comment on the presence of the vehicles or offer any information about their owners.

She also didn’t comment on the mansion itself. Even in the afternoon sunshine, it was a dilapidated ruin, a condemned corpse. Adam could tell that it was the sort of place that hadn’t been razed only because demolition was too expensive. And yet lights flickered inside, a heavy beat pulsing strong enough to vibrate through the damp ground.

Adam felt a little like he’d entered a faery labyrinth. There were too many elements here that didn’t quite match, creating an inside-out puzzle with no obvious solution. He wasn’t sure whether Hennessy meant for him to leave her there. At the very least, his senses were pricked more with curiosity than wariness, and he trusted his instincts. He didn’t think they were in danger.

Hennessy hopped off the bike. “Let’s go,” she said. “Around here.”

So apparently he was coming with.

Rather than dragging him through the yawning front doors, she brought him on a long journey around the house. Adam checked his pant legs for ticks as he waded through the gardens and lawns. By the time she shoved open a swollen back door, revealing a musty hallway, he’d brushed off more than he cared to admit.

He sneezed as soon as he stepped inside, the dust making his eyes itch. All the lights had been reserved for the front of the property. Here, the farther they got from the windows, the more insistently the gloom pressed in. But even in the dimness, the beat still shook the floorboards, and he could hear the squeak of the angry wood under his shoes.

Hennessy took his elbow as though he’d get lost in the bowels of the house. In fairness, he was thoroughly turned around by the time she unlocked a new door and threw it wide. Golden sunlight edged around blackout curtains pulled over the windows - they'd made it back to the outer part of the floorplan.

“Welcome to my office,” Hennessy said.

Adam blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust well enough to view the space. “Kinda unconventional choice for a real estate investment.”

“Maybe I’m one of those fixers,” she said. “You know, the ones who film those gentrification reality shows? This place would paint a pretty picture if you sank, oh, a million or two into it. But no, it’s not mine. On paper, at least. More’s the pity.”

“Whose is it?”

“Don’t know, don’t care. No one’s ever come around. Did you see this fucking place? Nobody in their right mind wants it. The owner must use it for a tax writeoff. It’s perfect.”

Adam sighed. “So you’re homeless.”

“By choice, asshole. I had to dig deep into my network to outfit this bitch with running water and electricity. I could afford a traditional apartment if I wanted one. Anyway, this place will serve me until something fucks it, and then I’ll find a new place. No contracts tying me down, no obligations to fulfill. That’s how I operate. By all means, judge away, but don’t bitch at me.”

He didn’t have enough information to mount an argument right now, but he made a mental note to research alternative housing options. Even if she didn’t get arrested for breaking and entering, he suspected the mansion was riddled with asbestos.

Hennessy flipped a light switch, and an overhead fixture flickered to life. She must have installed some kind of generator, Adam thought, to avoid the complication of utility bills.

Then he took in the actual room. And paused.

About half of the floor was covered in drop cloths. An easel and high-seated chair sat in the center of the room. On the easel was a canvas that had been painted with a pale rainbow gradient, some kind of background layer prior to deeper detail work. Against a side wall, hundreds of different paints were arranged on a rickety table - closed watercolor palettes, bottled inks, markers, acrylic tubes, oils. The walls were lined with canvases, some partially painted, some complete, some stacked in five-deep piles. Other tools were scattered around the floor, too, scrapers and screwdrivers and chisels and pens and objects Adam couldn’t name.

Hennessy had said that she was a forger, but Adam somehow hadn’t imagined this labor-intensive process. He’d been picturing digital manipulation, mass printing, half-assed projects. The hands-on work in this room belied a level of dedication and skill that he hadn’t anticipated.

“Did you paint everything in here?”

Many of the canvases had nothing in common. Adam could find no unifying color scheme, theme, or even brush style. A more well-versed art connoisseur might have found fault, but Adam himself didn’t see any obvious tells. He would have assumed a different artist was responsible for each piece.

“All but those,” Hennessy said, and jerked her thumb toward a lopsided stack of multi-sized canvases piled in the corner.

“References?”

“Worthless art. I’ll paint over it. It’s much easier to acquire a period-appropriate canvas than to forge one. A clever historian always susses out the masquerading modern piece, unless you’ve got weeks to sink into research. The most perfect forgery in the world can be felled by a single idiotic discrepancy. I prefer to minimize the risk wherever possible.”

“Can’t they x-ray?” Adam asked. “I’d heard museums use x-rays to detect forgeries.”

“Ah,” Hennessy said, grinning the same way Gansey did whenever someone knew about one of his niche history interests. “That’s why you’ve got to know your client’s intention from the get-go. If they’re aiming to dupe a true curator, extra care is required. Price goes up.”

“Why not take legal commissions?” Adam crossed to one of the canvases, inspecting it. The level of detail was striking - though he had little artistic background, he could tell that the work had required both technical expertise and significant patience.

“I mean,” he added, when Hennessy didn’t answer, “assuming you’re telling the truth about painting these, you’re excellent. There’s nothing stopping you from going into illustration. Maybe developing an original portfolio, making a name for yourself.”

“You know, Parrish,” she snapped, “sometimes people _aren’t_ looking for your stick-up-ass criticisms.”

Adam blinked, turning back to her. It was weird to think that he might have offended her without trying. “I wasn’t actually criticizing, for once. I just meant - I don’t get why you’d do this when you have marketable skills. Seems high risk, low reward.”

“Same reason I’d rather squat in this dump than bind myself to a lease.”

“Doesn’t help me. I don’t get that either.”

“I don’t vibe with above-board freelancing. I don’t vibe with landlords. I don’t vibe with anything that requires me to act like a productive member of society. The risks of crime are well worth the freedom they bring. I’m not going to pretend to be anything other than my own goddamn self.”

Adam reflected, again, that Hennessy and Ronan had more in common than either of them wanted to admit. “Seems like a pretty privileged outlook,” he said mildly. “Being an asshole just because you can get away with it.”

Maybe not privileged in Hennessy’s case. For her, getting caught had to have awful potential repercussions. But her love affair with danger led Adam to believe that the risks were probably a feature, not a bug. Anything to get her blood pumping.

Hennessy laughed, her lip curling. “What do _you_ know about privilege, asshole?”

He shrugged one shoulder and turned back to the canvas. She didn't pursue the discussion. After five minutes of silent contemplation, he said, “Do you do originals?”

Hennessy came to stand beside him. “Originals don’t pay the bills.”

“Sure,” Adam said. “But I figure art’s gotta be a hobby, too. Otherwise you wouldn’t be this good at it.”

“Art and I have a complicated relationship.”

“Depression messes with creativity, I guess,” Adam mused. “It’s one of the clinical factors. Did you do originals before?”

“I am deeply charmed by the assumption that I’ve ever _not_ been like this,” Hennessy said.

Adam thought she was finished, but then she hummed. “I have my vent pieces, I suppose. Mania sometimes drives away all cognizance. The demon begs to be exorcised. I’m ruined for anything productive, so I hurl emotions at a canvas until I'm able to get my act together. Paint is desecrated, fumes are huffed, pages are torn, blood is shed. But I’ll be damned if I call the results _artwork._ There’s nothing artistic about them.”

“So you _do_ paint originals. You just don’t like them.”

Hennessy let out an exasperated huff. “What would I title that shit for a museum? _Sad Girl Feels Like Every Other Sad Girl, Thinks She Has Something New To Say._ Good God, the arrogance. There’s no technical prowess, no depth, no range. No thought given to the composition. Sloppy, boring. Disgusting. _Imagine_ showing work like that to people. How fucking masturbatory. You need two people to experience art: the artist and the audience. An artist who paints with no regard for her audience is a lazy twat at best.”

“That seems extreme.”

“It’s all just fucking manipulation, Parrish. I’m not studying to create a pretty picture. I’m deciding what people ought to feel, when they ought to feel it. How does this color choice influence the mood? What about the use of jagged lines around the subject? Would rounded strokes change the ambiance? Every artist has their own tics and tricks to manipulate their entourage, their signature arrogant bullshit. It’s not difficult to emulate in forgery, not if you know what you’re looking for. I could craft my own agenda if I wanted to. But I don’t. Because I don’t have a goddamn thing to say. My vent pieces mean nothing. All they tell you is that I’m an embarrassment. I can do better.”

Unlike most of her speeches, Adam actually believed in this one's sincerity.   
He stepped away, taking a cross-legged seat in front of another large canvas. This one was about four feet tall. It depicted a young woman in period clothing, perched on a swingset in a garden. “Will touching the canvas ruin it?”

“You can make out with it for all I care.”

Rather than pressing his fingertips to the tacky whorls of paint making up the subject’s dress, Adam gripped the edges of the canvas and gingerly slid it aside, revealing the piece stacked behind it.

“Fuck,” Hennessy said, “speaking of being an embarrassment. This eyesore. Look away, Parrish.”

“Vent piece,” he guessed.

“Fucking obviously.”

The subject of this painting was another girl. She stood in the middle of a charcoal-smudged room, looking over her shoulder, backless dress visible to the viewer, neck and wrists adorned with strings of beads. Her face was pained. Across her back, a tattoo stretched over her spine, a yawning dark slash. A closer inspection revealed shadowed teeth, sharpened points on the top and bottom of the gash. Behind them, the girl’s innards were exposed, as though the mouth had torn a hole straight through her when it opened. Living monster rather than two-dimensional design.

“It's a goddamn trainwreck," Hennessy half-snarled. "Look at this shit. There’s no point to painting the subject in color if you can’t keep your light sources straight. Why the fuck are there shadows on every side of her body? The skin tone couldn’t be less cohesive if I tried. The viewer's eye is drawn to her jewelry before her face or her back, and the jewelry doesn’t matter at all. It’s an afterthought. The shoulder anatomy is all off - bitch has a broken neck, craning at that angle. All passion, no accuracy. Looks like a middle schooler’s art final. If only I was eleven, it could earn me a scholarship. But I’m not fucking eleven. I need to burn this.”

Adam could see what she meant - the perspective was imperfect, the brush strokes hasty and flawed. He could imagine its usefulness as a rough concept, though, a design to refine in further drafts. The piece wasn’t nearly as worthless as she seemed to think.

“Dark,” he commented.

“Heavyhanded twaddle. There could not be less subtlety or nuance if I’d tried. Oh, God, this piece is mortifying, but I'll be infinitely more mortified if you think it’s _good.”_

He _did_ think it was good, at least in terms of piquing his interest. Hennessy didn’t seem like she’d appreciate this, though, so he said, “Is it supposed to be a soul mark? The mouth on her back?”

“Sure fucking is. Look at you, grasping the heavy-handed meaning straight out. Didn't even have to dig. You’re so intelligent.”

“Is it recent?”

“Not as recent as you’re thinking. Pre-Ronan. My future angst paintings will include far more specific and passive-aggressive allusions to him, I’m sure.”

“I don’t get it.” As Adam examined the painting, Hennessy settled beside him. “Seems like a lot of upset over someone you hadn’t met yet.”

“It’s not the sort of shit you could understand. The one drawback of your sexy situation, I suppose.”

That sounded an awful lot like Ronan’s brand of self-loathing. Adam shifted to face her, palms resting lightly on his knees. “Not empathetically. Intellectually, though, try me.”

Hennessy turned toward him as well, mirroring his body language. “It wasn't about _Ronan,_ " she said impatiently. "I didn't give a shit who my soulmate was. I don’t believe in good soulmate relationships. I don’t believe you get something for nothing, and I certainly don’t believe in love. What I do believe is that a soulmate connection gives you free license to hurt someone. They’ll never be rid of you no matter what you do. All bets are off. And I suppose everyone deserves the awful things their soulmates do to them, or so we're meant to believe. What would be the point otherwise?”

Adam raised an eyebrow.

“I’m sure lovey-dovey bullshit exists for _some_ people,” Hennessy added. “The possibility doesn’t happen to run in my veins.”

“God,” Adam replied. “You just got possessed by the ghost of past me. I can’t believe I was ever this embarrassing.”

“Oh, I can believe it. You do seem the type of douchebag to develop a superiority complex. What’s it like, dragging around a soul as pure as the most expensive methamphetamines? None of those pesky emotions for you, I’m sure, as you survey us all from the enlightened high ground. You must have so much extra time on your hands.”

Adam shrugged. “Sounds about right.”

“So here’s what I really don’t get,” Hennessy said, apparently deciding it was her turn for interrogation. “You’ve got a Get Out of Jail Free card. What the _fuck_ are you doing?”

“Pardon?”

“I don’t think I need to clarify.”

Adam said, “I’m gonna need you to elaborate on your thesis here.”

Hennessy didn't have any problem doing so. “Why the fuck,” she said, “have you Superglued yourself to some random passing polycule? If it was a parasitic endeavor, I’d applaud. But I’ve yet to see you reap a single benefit. By contrast, you’re making ongoing tragic sacrifices such as: existing near Ronan. You’ve struck me as a fairly survivalist individual up to this point, so I’d like to know what the _fuck_ is wrong with you.”

He surveyed her. He’d become familiar enough with her body language to believe her agitation was genuine, but he wasn't sure where it came from. “So in your humble opinion, what should I be doing instead?”

_“Literally anything._ The world’s your oyster. No chains tethering you to this mortal realm - you could _at least_ attach yourself to someone who’s not a Grade A dicksqueeze. Find yourself an idiotic sugar daddy. Kill him in his sleep. Get a sexy inheritance out of the deal.”

“Yeah, I guess I could’ve done any of that,” Adam said. “I decided I wanted this instead. Feel free to consider that a friendship dealbreaker, I won’t be offended. I’m just as mystified by it as you are.”

“But why don’t you _leave?”_ Hennessy demanded. “You thought you wanted it once, sure, but now - you’ve got a stable job, you’ve got the means, you’ve got the motive. Is it inertia? Too much work to unpeel yourself? You can change direction at any time, mate. Only gamblers chase the lost income down the drain.”

“This is actually bugging you,” Adam observed, marveling. “I _know_ you don’t care that much about my wellbeing. Are you looking for reasons to stay? I don’t have any for you. Personally, I can’t replace a decade of built-up family. Can’t replicate it in less than another decade, either. I’m sorta locked in to this particular group of assholes. But it helps that I still like them.”

“But why the fuck,” she said, “are you sticking with _Ronan?_ You told me he’s good, when we first met. And yet you’re pissed because he’s the devil. Operating under some cognitive dissonance fugue, I assume, you can’t reconcile - I’m _trying,_ Parrish, I’m doing the mental math, I’m whipping out my algorithms, and I can’t make this equation balance. Why the fuck are you here if you’re allowed to leave?”

Her voice cracked on the last word. She looked furious about it, but the damage was already done; this was all Adam needed to realize that she was deeply upset. An analysis of the speech didn’t explain the source of her distress. Adam wasn’t sure whether she considered him a victim, or whether she considered him a traitor, or whether she was seeking reassurance, or whether she was picking a fight, or whether she wanted a legitimate answer.

He didn’t move, and he made sure his face reflected no pity before he spoke. “Simplest option is usually the right one,” he said, careful. “If I can leave whenever I want, and I’m still here, it must be ‘cause I want to stay.”

She closed her eyes, her mouth pinched at the corners.

“You can be done with him,” Adam added. “Your whole premise there, that I’m allowed to leave and you’re not, that’s horseshit. You can walk away. There’s no gun to your damn head. He’ll be fine.” He exhaled. “I know I said - but he’ll be fine. I’m pretty sure he'll cope better with being left over asshole behavior than with being abandoned.”

Hennessy said, softly, like she was confessing a mortal sin, “I don’t want to be done with him.”

“Well then, welcome to hell. We’ll have to solve it like adults instead. Please only make me mediate as a last resort.”

She sat there frowning for about half a minute, looking very tired and very sad and not at all like her usual self. Then she laid back and stared at the ceiling, unfolding her legs and kicking her boots into Adam’s lap.

“The mystery soulmate’s dead, right? The one on his hip. The murder mark.”

“That’s not my thing to talk about.”

“I’m not an idiot, Parrish.”

“He’s dead,” Adam confirmed. “Still not my thing to talk about.”

Hennessy laughed. It was a single sharp, vindictive bark, nothing mirthful about it. “Ronan did it, yeah?”

“Excuse me?”

“Ronan killed him.”

Annoyance began to crowd out Adam’s pity. “Could you just, like, turn off the crazy for ten minutes? You’re exhausting.”

“Had to be Ronan. All you motherfuckers tiptoeing around it, and I can’t even tell which of us you’re protecting. I’ve been braced for a soulmate who does worse than murder. Can’t imagine why anyone would have a mark that gory unless it’s a kill-or-be-killed situation. Seeing as Ronan hasn’t starred in any obits lately, must be the victim’s blood smeared over his skin. Hell of a reminder. No wonder he won’t talk about it. Not the sort of shit you admit on a first date.”

She had, somehow, dragged Adam into dangerous territory. Lying about Ronan’s past would buy nothing except time. Though Hennessy had not landed upon the truth, she had unearthed a sling of easily-loaded bullets. Adam’s first instinct was to respond with his usual dry irritation, but then he imagined Hennessy seeking answers from Ronan, emptying the newly-acquired clip into his body, cheerfully tossing the weapon aside as Ronan bled out at her feet.

Adam liked Hennessy. He wanted to believe that there was good in her, because that would make life a hell of a lot easier. He was also aware that any knowledge of Kavinsky made her more dangerous to Ronan than she already had been.

“If you ever say any of that to him,” Adam said, “I will ruin you.”

Hennessy propped herself up on her elbows. “Ominous in theory, but lacking specifics.”

“That’s because I haven’t made a plan yet.”

“Spitball. Bounce your ideas off me. We ought to make sure the threat is properly intimidating.”

“I’m not joking around,” Adam said. “Listen. You do not say that shit to Ronan. Instant Game Over. I’m just telling you now. Consider it a boundary marked by an electric fence.”

“I solemnly swear not to mention Ronan’s obvious murder history to him. But you do need to tell me what the threat entails. Sate my curiosity. It’s now a legal obligation.”

Adam sighed. He considered and discarded several increasingly heinous examples, and finally said, “You’re a criminal with presumable enemies and a drug problem. Plenty of avenues are open. Do me a favor and leave Ronan alone so I never have to think about it again. My skin is crawling.”

Hennessy exhaled and flopped back down, far more relaxed than she had any right to be. “Oh. That’s all right, then. Just needed to be sure you weren’t threatening Jordan. I’d have killed you about it, our budding friendship notwithstanding, and it would have made the afternoon awkward.”

“That’s fair,” Adam said. It was fair. He couldn’t have tolerated any version of himself whose threats met those parameters. “I wouldn’t mess with your sister. I prefer to minimize collateral damage when I do bad shit. I am dead serious about the Ronan thing, though.”

“I see our allyship hasn’t quite eroded your bedrock loyalty,” Hennessy said. “That’s good. You ought to be consistent if you’re going to give your soul away for nothing.”

“Thanks for the advice.” Adam wanted to get up and examine another canvas, but Hennessy’s boots remained firmly planted on his legs. After a moment, he added, “It was a suicide.”

“Ah.” Hennessy said this as though it was the most obvious fact in the world, like she'd been stupid not to guess it herself. “Ronan fulfills his personal destiny of driving some asshole off a cliff, the universe labels my existence a hilariously ironic punishment. Quaint. It’s working quite well, all things considered. He’s a whole-ass mess. The universe knows what she’s doing.”

“Okay,” Adam said, patient. “I’m gonna give you this one as a freebie. If you say that anywhere near Gansey, _he_ will ruin you before I can.”

“Touchy, touchy.”

“It was a bad situation. Ronan wasn’t at fault. I’m telling you so that he doesn’t have to, because you react with shit like _obviously murder happened.”_

“Were you close, then? To the dramatically departed asshole?”

“I hated his guts. Good riddance, in my opinion.”

Hennessy laughed. “Man after my own heart, then. Fucking tragic that I won’t get to meet him.”

“I liked that he made Ronan miserable,” Adam said, more contemplative than confessional. “I liked that they made each other miserable.”

Hennessy propped herself back up. “Is this your roundabout way of confessing that you actually _are_ a parasite? Mad respect if you’re running a long con. I want in.”

“It was back before I gave a shit.”

Adam didn’t know how much else to explain. The information wasn’t a horrible secret - it was just a boring story. He couldn’t stand to verbalize just how wrapped up in Gansey he’d been, or how stupidly jealous and superior and insecure and neurotic, or how pathetic.

He had no trouble with the callousness. That, at least, lined up with what Hennessy already knew of him.

Rather than digging for details, Hennessy whistled. “And now you’re willing to commit all sorts of unnamed horrific acts to spare his feelings. Or so you say. Hell of a turnaround.”

“Time makes strangers of us all, I guess.”

She tilted her head. “Were _you_ at fault, then? Did you kill the soulmate?”

At Adam’s exasperated groan, Hennessy added, “Hey, don’t act like I’m irrational, wise guy. You’ve all but admitted you’re down for murder. You didn’t like the dude. Suicides are easy to fake. I can see it now. Your guilt chains you to Ronan like your own special secret soul bond, and that's why you're still here.”

“No, I did not kill him,” Adam said, with the air of an annoyed substitute teacher reviewing basic math with rowdy children. “No one was responsible for what happened to him except him. He was an asshole. He could’ve gotten help, and he didn’t. Now I need you to _not_ use this in your vengeance plot against Ronan. I know it’s the lowest-hanging fruit and agonizing to give up, but you’re gonna have to deal.”

“This wouldn’t be fun,” Hennessy said. “I take no pleasure in his kicked puppy demeanor. His irritation, though, that’s a money shot. Don't worry your pretty little head. I won’t pin any of these sad factoids to my drawing board.”

“Why did you tell me where you live?” Adam asked.

He asked partly because he was curious, partly because the conversation had reminded him, and partly to catch her off guard.

Hennessy was quiet for long enough that Adam assumed she wouldn’t answer. Then she said, “I don’t know.”

“It took you that long to come up with _I don’t know?”_

“I was seeking the deep truth within myself. Unfortunately, no earth-shattering epiphany occurred.”

She sat up, though, suddenly, and leaned forward. Her boots hadn’t left Adam’s lap. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For how I met him.”

“Come again?”

“I mean, it’s technically not my fault. I didn’t _know_ I was about to meet him. I didn’t put that godawful flower on his shoulder. I’m not apologizing for any specific action here. I just wish it hadn’t made such a mess.”

“Okay,” Adam said.

“I can only do so much to mitigate the mess, Parrish. It's not all on me. He’s got to meet me halfway.”

Adam nodded. This aspect of relationship negotiation was one he was intimately familiar with. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> adam yells at hennessy a little but in, like, a productive way

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my original draft of this chapter had this scene + the ronan and hennessy scene after it. but when i did my second draft rewrite, this scene became long enough to be its own chapter. so! enjoy

The newfound camaraderie was intoxicating enough for Adam and Hennessy to spend most of the day in her studio. She talked him through different painting techniques, forgery tricks, and easily-avoided mistakes. She even told him about the artists whose work she’d “unearthed.” Most of them were minor painters who’d been dead long enough not to care whether their name was attached to a false idol. A few canvases boasted reproductions or originals from Monet, Sargent, Dali - practice pieces Hennessy kept for herself because they'd never pass a curator's inspection.

Adam seemed honestly interested in the work, too, which pleased her. She couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment that she transitioned from memorable and dramatic historical reenactments to less-considered ramblings. All she knew was that at some point, they ended up splayed on their stomachs on the floor, and she pressed his palm to the three-dimensional whorls of an acrylic rhododendron, and he looked up at her with an expression that might have been genuine affection.

“They won’t let you fondle the canvases in museums,” she informed him. “Bad for business. That’s why everyone needs a heinous bitch friend who’s got all the classics decked out in a musty mansion.”

“I like it,” Adam said. “The tactile feel of the acrylics, I mean. Should’ve kept fingerpainting past preschool.”

As the day wore on, Adam’s attention drifted more and more often to his phone. By his furrowed brow and the increasing length of time he spent tapping the screen, Hennessy guessed that he was embroiled in intense conversation.

“Ronan?” she asked.

Adam shook his head. “Gansey. Looking for Ronan.”

Misgiving gripped her gut. Ronan had shown her the scars from his own attempt in the diner the first night they’d met. He’d been unashamed, challenging, nearly prideful. She’d thought of the marks as trophies from a past he’d left behind, but -

“Is he... safe?” she asked.

Adam rolled his eyes, which was more reassuring than a thousand actual reassurances. “I’m one hundred percent positive he’s fine.” Glancing down at his phone, he added, “Yeah, he’s at a motel.”

“So the apartment’s empty?”

“Aside from Gansey.” The corner of Adam’s mouth tugged into a sly grin. “Don’t tell me you’re finding my place more appealing than the Mildew Castle. I thought this was your dream home.”

“Your bed’s more comfortable than mine.” This was an objective fact, easy to admit. Given how stringently she avoided slumber, Hennessy did not invest many resources into cozy nap privileges.

“Oh, so I get one whole night of peace and quiet apart from Ronan's snoring, and then _you_ decide to steal it.”

“You gave me a key,” she said. “So you’re stuck with me no matter what. You might as well chauffeur my sorry ass so I don’t have to call a ride. Shit's better for the environment.”

“Yeah, you strike me as a hardcore environmentalist,” he said dryly, but he didn’t raise any actual protest as they migrated back to his place.

Night had properly fallen by the time they arrived. Hennessy entered to find that the apartment smelled fucking delicious. Wanting to situate herself near the source of the aroma, she settled into a rickety chair at the rickety kitchen table. Gansey was standing at the stove, stirring some kind of soup-like concoction. As he worked, Hennessy began to build stacks from the mountains of paper junk atop the table. Little by little, a clear wooden surface was revealed.

She was partway through pulling together all the empty envelopes when she realized that Gansey was agitated. Something about the way he stood, she thought, or the way he stirred, or - yeah, there he went, chopping a stalk of celery in a manner violent enough to justify an arrest warrant.

“Yeah, get it,” she said. “Show that bitch who’s boss.”

“Wh - oh. Oops.” Gansey made a visible effort to calm his outward appearance, just as Adam returned from putting a load of laundry in the washer.

“Can I help?” Adam asked, shouldering his way into the small kitchen space.

“Garlic?” Gansey said, holding up a bulb. “Peel? Mince?”

Adam constructed himself a tiny but efficient workstation beside the stove. Hennessy briefly considered offering to help herself, since she'd already stacked all these envelopes, but then she remembered who the fuck she was.

She’d zoned out by the time Gansey's mood betrayed him. “Take it easy,” Adam murmured. When she looked up, he’d laid a hand over Gansey’s where it rested on the cutting board. A rather grotesquely mutilated tomato was strewn across the wooden surface, exactly like a gory crime scene.

“You should sit down,” Adam added.

“I’m fine.” Gansey rubbed his temple with his other hand, making no attempt to pull away from Adam. “Sorry. I’m scattered, not faint.”

“You’re upset.” There was an edge of accusation in Adam’s voice. 

Hennessy couldn’t imagine what Gansey might be angry with Adam about - did Gansey think they’d been too harsh in their judgment of Ronan? Was Gansey angry that Adam had defended her above his actual committed partner?

“I’m frequently upset,” Gansey said. “Really, Adam, I’m all right.”

“I didn’t realize you were _this_ upset. Why didn’t you call me earlier? I could’ve helped look.”

Gansey shrugged. He moved his hand away to delicately scoop the tomato innards off the tray. “It’s all resolved now, anyway.”

“I _would’ve_ helped.”

Hennessy couldn’t understand the ongoing edge in Adam’s tone. As far as she could tell, Gansey hadn’t implied anything different. Of course, it was possible that the fluid language of passive aggression was too subtle for her to catch.

She kicked her chair back on two legs and watched them, making no real secret of the observation. Neither of them even glanced at her. Gansey appeared to note Adam’s edginess just like Hennessy had, because he frowned and said, “Of course. I know. You always do.”

“You called Noah.” The edge had lost its sharpness, trading blades for prickles. _“He_ might’ve been on the other side of the country for all you knew.”

With a rush of glee, Hennessy did successfully pinpoint this emotion: _jealousy._

So the Great and Rational Adam Parrish _was_ capable of stupid feelings.

If Hennessy could identify the tone, she suspected that Gansey shared the ability. Certainly his little huff of impatience seemed to say so. “I don’t appreciate being put on the defensive. I thought it would be polite to give you and Hennessy space, rather than asking for help with locating someone you do not currently wish to see. If I _had_ asked you to help me look, I would have been denying you that space. I expected you to be annoyed that I involved you for a non-emergency. If I felt things were emergency-level, I would have called you, and you know that.”

Gansey’s tension increased throughout this precise little speech, his consonants clipped and his punctuation terse. Hennessy felt her eyebrows lift.

If it had been her and Ronan, this kind of tension would lead to a shouting match. But Adam exhaled a long stream of breath, leaned over, and bumped his head gently against Gansey’s. “Sorry,” he said. “I know. Sorry. Thank you. I didn’t mean to pick a fight.”

Watching them together, Hennessy thought that she _hadn’t_ been foolish to assume they were soulmates. It wasn’t just the casual intimacy. And the assumption _also_ wasn’t all based around the fact that Gansey was besotted; she didn’t know him very well, but he seemed like the kind of person who would become besotted with a wilted houseplant given the opportunity.

The more important variable was Adam. Unlike Gansey, Adam was not overly friendly and enthusiastic. He was quiet and prideful and dickish and careful with his emotional investments. The way he relaxed around Gansey - _softening,_ as if this was the one environment in which he would ever default to kindness - spoke of a soulmate-level bond. Hennessy couldn’t reconcile Adam’s complete lack of soul marks with the image before her. He shouldn’t have been capable of a connection powerful enough to alter his whole demeanor, and yet.

She wondered if he was faking it. He’d had years to learn to play Gansey’s strings, to perfect the right mannerisms and words and habits and conflict resolution guidelines. She supposed anyone could pretend to be anyone else’s soulmate, given enough room to practice.

She wondered if Gansey knew.

She still couldn’t fully wrap her head around the supposed endgame. Companionship and familiarity, sure. A place to call home. But it seemed like an awful lot of work for something so _mundane._

Gansey touched Adam’s hair once, briefly, and then extricated himself to rinse his hands. “As I said, all's resolved. I would very much prefer not to wallow.”

The pieces suddenly clicked.

“Did _you_ fight with Ronan?” Hennessy asked. She made a half-assed attempt to sound sympathetic, but the delight was hard to suppress.

“Oh, my God,” Adam said. “Read the room.”

“I’m reading it. Lynch isn’t dead, Gansey’s perturbed, _you’re_ spitting jealous over - not being invited on the body patrol, I think? This is such a fucking mess. I’m _thriving.”_

“Thank you for your helpful observations,” Adam said. “Sorry, Gansey. She gets like this when she’s relieved. We’re stuck with it as long as we’re stuck with her, I guess. Better get used to it.”

Hennessy stared at him for a shocked moment, and then she began to giggle. Helplessly. Vigorously. _“That’s_ how you’re dealing with me now? Condescending third person horseshittery? That’s your go-to option for your diplomatic relations?”

“It’s really my only recourse when you decide to be like” - Adam waved a hand - _“that.”_

“I’m not _relieved._ I love all dysfunction all the time. Keeps me young. Learn the difference, man, stop humanizing me.”

“She gets like this,” Adam repeated. “Endorphin rush or something. Anyway.”

Hennessy doubted that Adam had done enough deep analysis of her moods to make an accurate observation. More likely, she thought, he’d just derailed the conversation before her glee could cause Gansey true distress.

She glanced at Gansey to see how distressed he looked, but he was just studying her with a thoughtful expression. “It’s almost,” he said slowly, “like having Henry here. Except if Henry was chaotic evil.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard about this one.”

“Another one of Gansey’s soulmates,” Adam explained. “Really can’t decide whether he’d love you or hate you.”

“I _did_ fight with Ronan,” Gansey said. It took Hennessy a second to remember the question that had begun this river of inane horseshit. “We had a productive discussion regarding the merits of _not_ disappearing without warning while potentially suicidal. I’m sure you’re familiar with the subject matter, thanks to conversations you’ve no doubt had with your sister.”

There was literally no reason to invoke Jordan except to be mean. More delight hit before any offense could. Hennessy released an almost silent scream of laughter, pressing her hands to her cheeks, chair legs slamming down to the floor. When she’d recovered slightly, she managed, between breathless wheezes, “Oh, _no._ I _do_ like you.”

Gansey looked both surprised and pleased by this development. She wasn’t sure what result he’d been aiming for.

“Oh God,” Adam said. “You’re corrupting him.”

“Good,” Hennessy replied. “I’d hate it if you were nice people. Now I’ve smudged my foundation. Time to call it a night.”

This mostly just meant unearthing a new pair of too-large sweatpants and tank, scrubbing her face clean, rinsing the worst of the mansion’s grime from her feet, and taking a sleep-avoidance pill. She returned to the living room feeling much more relaxed. A few cigarettes on the balcony later, dinner was ready; she ate about three bowls of the soup and then collapsed on Ronan’s side of the bed.

"I think I'm dying," she announced.

“So where am I sleeping tonight?” Adam asked from the doorway. “Because if it's the couch, that's fine. I just have to make up the sheets.”

“I’m not kicking you out of your bed, Parrish,” she said. “This king-sized bastard? You’ve got plenty of room to huddle up on your side and still leave room for Jesus. Shouldn’t have any trouble avoiding my cooties. I promise not to get touchyfeely in my sleep. Unless you think Gansey will be tortured by loneliness, in which case, go console your boy toy.”

“Don’t hog the blankets,” Adam said, and that was the end of it. He didn’t have nearly as much trouble with the concept of bed sharing as Ronan had.

It wasn’t truly late yet, but Hennessy had eaten too much to move, and Adam was apparently an old man trapped in a much younger body. As he climbed underneath the quilt and began reading some milquetoast nonfiction in the lamplight, Hennessy tried to sort her thoughts. The stimulant she'd taken made her brain itch.

She wanted Ronan to remain part of her life. She wanted to trust him. She wanted to believe him. She wanted what he’d promised - a safe place to lie down, a comforting presence following nightmares, a chance to recover on her own terms. She wanted the fairytale, the get-rich-quick scheme, the cure-all for her varied ills.

It was almost funny - she made an excellent mark for a conman. All her life, she’d refused to fall prey to these sorts of traps and relentlessly mocked those who did. Hell, she'd set her own just to see what would happen. She’d earned this, probably. It seemed that even the warrior queen Hennessy was not immune to humanity’s most pathetic pitfalls.

She would never have the fairytale because the fairytale did not exist. She could not have this comfort; salvation was not an option. Prior to meeting Ronan, she’d known that. She'd held onto this fundamental truth like letting go would kill her. And then he’d gotten her thinking that maybe -

So she needed to determine how far from fairytale the actual Ronan Lynch was. And then she needed to defend herself. Fortify her walls. Take a page from Jordan’s book and lay down boundaries. Snarl thick ivy around the castle grounds. A stupid construction project if there'd ever been one, but a project she needed to undertake if she meant to stay.

She imagined running. She turned the possibility over, examining it, exploring every angle to double-check her conclusions. Running was the easiest course of action - she knew how to disappear. She’d still have her weekly calls with Jordan, too, so not all would be lost. It was possible to wash Ronan and his family members out of her life for good.

And then she’d be alone, and helpless, and empty, and miserable, and back where she'd started.

This was the first place that had welcomed her in a long, long time. The first group in a long time to offer belonging without demanding her soul.

All the same, what had happened here could not happen again. She could not allow it - would not allow it. She would not permit Ronan Lynch to break her.

So that was the goal, then.

How to achieve the goal, she had no fucking idea. Relationship building wasn’t exactly her strongest skillset. Sure, she destroyed every meaningful connection she forged, but there was more to it than that. She’d been existing as her own self-sufficient island for so long that she wasn’t sure she knew how to... _grow_ around another person. Or how to let another person plant seeds inside her heart.

There _was_ someone who must have been just as inexperienced in these areas once upon a time, though, and she happened to be sharing his mattress.

“Parrish,” she said.

“Mm?”

“How did you go from wanting him miserable to wanting him _not_ miserable?”

Adam slid a bookmark into his book, closed it, and set the tome aside, because of course he was the kind of stickler who used proper bookmarks. “I got over myself.”

“Not helpful,” she said. Banging her closed fists against each other, she asked, “How did you go from this” - and then interlaced her fingers - “to this?”

“I’m not much of a storyteller.”

“You really are fucking useless sometimes, you know that? I’m not asking you to sign a fucking blood pact. I just want a little knowledge.”

“I think that’s a word-for-word quote from Eve trying to get original Adam to eat the fruit. In Genesis.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll figure it out myself.”

“I don’t think you could replicate what we did," Adam explained. "The process was of a pretty physical nature. And also, uh, ill-advised to begin with.”

This immediately piqued her curiosity. He was probably right that she’d find no solution to her own problems, here, but she was fucking dying to know how two such different people had managed to stay so glued for so long. Some part of her was fascinated by the concept that the sex had just been _that_ good.

“Tell me. Tell me. Tell me.” She wiggled closer to him. “Tell me. Tell me.”

“Wow.” He propped the book between them like a shield. “All right. We hooked up a lot, I had issues, he had issues, neither of us had any clue what was going on with the other, we found out, we sorted our shit, and here we are. Happy?”

“Storytelling this unsatisfying is a sign of disease. Get help.”

“That’s all I’ve got for you.” He lifted the book again.

Hennessy rolled onto her back with a huff. “Okay,” she said, “so, the shit sorting. How did you do that?”

Adam snorted. “It’s not that hard."

"Humor me."

"Look. I’m not some kind of relationship doctor. But all you really gotta know is what you want and what he wants. Then the discussion's all about whether those things are compatible, if you can compromise, how you get to where you wanna be, whatever. Okay? You done probing my personal life now?”

“How did you make it good?”

One of his eyebrows arched so high it was a wonder it didn’t fly away. “The physical stuff? Trial and error, mostly.”

“The _relationship,_ jackass.”

“Oh. Well. That’s a big question.”

It didn’t feel like that big a question. Hennessy made an effort to pare down the specifics. “How do either of you know how to be any good for the other? Especially with him being how he is, and you being how you are, it’s - I can’t _fathom_ how you’re compatible.”

“Depends what you mean by ‘how he is.’”

“I don't know, an abrasive idiot with a bleeding heart and zero ability to conceptualize the future? Or any other traits that’ve made you want to strangle him. Take your pick.”

“And ‘how I am’?”

“You don’t have soulmates.”

Adam held himself still. He did it in such a way that Hennessy immediately noticed the attempt at non-reaction. His fingers tensed, his jaw tightening, chest barely moving as he breathed. He held himself so still.

“I’m not insulting you,” she added, because she knew it was sometimes hard to tell. “I swear I’m not. I already told you I think you struck gold in the good ol’ lottery of life. I’m just saying - I don’t understand how you're giving him what he needs, when you two can't really... connect on that level."

Adam's voice, when he spoke, was strained. “This is a kinda unusual angle to take, I think. You just got through telling me about how soulmates don’t have anything except karmic license to kill each other. Now they're suddenly fulfilling human needs? I'm not sure you can have it both ways.”

Hennessy didn't know how to clarify, but she’d dug deep enough already. Might as well commit. “What if,” she said, “there are things we need, and we can’t get them from anyone except that one specific fucking person - and then we’re all just, just - depriving each other and hurting each other and fucking each other over because we’re not actually good enough to rise to the challenge?”

“So Ronan’s supposed to fill a whole fistful of different people’s needs, you only have to focus on one neurotic asshole, and I’m the lucky son of a bitch who's home free?”

“If that’s how it goes,” she pressed, “then what do you _do_ to be good for him? Do you - do you try to replace what he’s missing, or pick up everyone else’s slack, or-”

“This whole conversation is so messed up I don’t even know where to start.”

To her horror, frustrated tears began to clog her throat, pricking at her eyes. “Fuck you. I’m asking you a real question because I want to know the fucking answer. I'll never meet anyone else stupid enough to play at soulmates with random strangers. Enlighten me.”

“C’mere.”

She thought she might punch him if he tried to hold her, but she scooted over to him and sat up. He reached out and took her face in both hands, squishing it, his mouth inches from hers. He enunciated very slowly and clearly, as though she might miss the words otherwise. “It. Does. Not. Matter. It does not matter. It _does not matter._ It does not. Matter. It does not. Matter not, it does. No one’s locked into having all their needs met by one predetermined person, holy _shit,_ you are _out of your mind._ It does not matter! Hennessy. It does not matter. I can’t believe I have to - God.”

_“How_ does it _not matter.”_

“Because you can learn to give people what they need even if it doesn’t come natural!” He was still holding her face, but now he’d graduated to near-shouting. “I don’t get it, I literally do not understand how this is such an impossible concept to you, I-”

“So then tell me!” she shouted back. “If you’ve learned so much, tell me!”

Adam released her, all at once, grabbing a pillow and pulling it over his face. A muffled noise emanated, long and mournful and possibly murderous. At least, Hennessy thought, she was frustrating him as much as he was frustrating her.

He took a few deep breaths and then removed the pillow. “He starts to lose it if he goes more than a month without seeing the stars. Real stars, like you get out in rural areas, not the washed-out satellites in the city. Napping on a cow or sheep is an instant brain reset. In a pinch, you can get half a brain reset by dragging him to a bird rescue or animal shelter.

“Part of him is always thinking about killing himself, but he won’t do it, and that part’s never going away. Hasn't, in all the time I've known him. He doesn’t talk about what he wants and he doesn’t say what he feels. He likes using physical affection to make a point. His shitty jokes are also affection, but real secret-like, since he's shit at being sincere. He runs into everything heart-first with zero plans to protect himself, and he gets mad if you call him an idiot about this, even though it's his dumbest trait by far.

“He needs to talk to his brothers regularly even when they’re fighting. He starts to disconnect when he's out of contact with them. He’s shitty about keeping regular doctor’s appointments, but Gansey tends to get on his case more than I do, so I don't have to worry too much. He cares too much about everything, and he can’t turn it off, and he gets hurt when I want him to. He’s a caustic asshole who could stand to be a little gentler. He's the gentlest person I know, at least when he _tries._

“He’s a good person and he’s a huge mess and all of that isn’t even a tenth of what I’ve learned about him. So could you _please_ get _over_ your stupid hangups? I can be what he needs because I love him enough to make the damn effort. You can be what he needs, too, if you’re willing to make the effort. But Kavinsky wasn’t willing, and he _was_ soul bonded to Ronan, and now he’s dead, and even if he was alive, Ronan would be long done with him. It doesn’t matter, Hennessy. It doesn’t matter if you’re soulmates or not. It literally doesn’t matter at all. Just shut the hell up. Shut up.”

Hennessy’s heart was beating hard against her ribs, a thudding pulse prompted by more than the stimulants.

“I keep telling you he’ll be fine if you leave,” Adam said, “and he will. You’re not gonna leave some gaping wound he can’t ever fill. He’s not gonna fill whatever hole you’ve got inside you. _Stop_ thinking of it as something that _has_ to save or destroy you. It literally doesn’t. It literally does not. God, I watched all this same nonsense go down with Ronan _years_ ago. I do not have the patience. Shut up. Shut _up.”_

Hennessy swallowed. She reached over and brushed Adam’s hand, surprised when he twined their fingers together rather than swatting her away.

“Your thesis is that it could be anyone, then," she said, blinking hard. "I could have anyone. Pluck a random bastard off the street and find something compatible in them, no matter who they are, where they’re from, what they want.”

_“Yes,”_ Adam said. “Yes, that is my thesis.”

“Hmm.”

“I really thought you were on this page already. I can’t believe you - God. Okay. Yes. Yes. Hennessy, please make some normal friends, I am begging you.”

“So your further thesis,” she said, “is that I can be good for my soulmate if I try to learn him. Study him like a book. Like you did.”

“Pretty sure that’s the _only_ way you can be good for him, yeah. You've got more control than you think. And honestly, watching you moping around acting like - like you’ve been victimized because you don’t feel like making an effort - it’s pissing me the hell off.”

“Okay,” Hennessy said, and closed her eyes. “There. See? Not so hard. That’s all I needed to know.”

“Is it?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “That's when I’m going to figure out what the hell is going on between us.”

“Thank God. I have such a headache.” He squeezed her fingers and then released her hand, turning onto his side, away from her.

She wasn’t sure this philosophy solved all of her problems. Certainly it didn’t mean an end to her soulmate-related existential crises. She still didn't know what the marks _meant,_ and that felt like a pretty fucking important detail.

But it did give her the footing to move forward. Here, then, was a choice. A branching pathway, a hollowed-out foundation, a beach wiped clean by the tide. If she thought of the relationship as a decision they were both making, she felt less doomed to ruin.

Tomorrow, then. Tonight would be sleepless, like most nights were sleepless, which would give her time to plan. And then the sky would lighten, and dawn would break, and Ronan would be somewhere in the city desperately needing a resolution. Hennessy could work with that. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the relationship negotiation tag FINALLY comes into play [THE CROWD ERUPTS WITH CHEERS]
> 
> ronan and hennessy talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shoutout to this chapter for taking 26 total hours to put together. good lord
> 
> warning that the chapter deals a lot with suicide, guilt, grief, unresolved feelings following death, etc. The Unpackening has begun (finally)

Hennessy napped fitfully for about three hours prior to dawn, too keyed-up to slip into REM sleep. When the sky began to lighten, she extricated herself from the bed and left a sleeping Adam and Gansey in the apartment.

After sending her first-ever text to Ronan’s phone - _I want to talk_ \- she returned to her studio to dress and do her makeup. She’d had enough of moonlighting as a has-been. It was long past time for the queen of hell to rise from the dead.

One more nap and one answered text later, she called a ride. She arrived at the motel in stylishly frayed denim jeans, a scarlet crop top, and a worn leather jacket. Her lips were red and her eyes were black and her cheekbones were sharper than ice skates. She’d traded her boots for sneakers and twisted her hair into a topknot to keep it out of the way. All things considered, she felt energized and competent and prepared for violence. The antithesis of everything she’d been upon first meeting Ronan.

It really was a seedy place, she observed. The only decent car in the lot was a Mustang the same color as her lipstick, which was just _begging_ to be stolen. The building’s walls were thin enough for her to hear the entire conversation that followed her knock.

“Right, Hennessy’s coming over,” Ronan said, as though this was a casual meetup that had slipped his mind. 

Hennessy didn’t buy that for a second.

“What!” replied an unfamiliar voice, more startled than upset. _“Why?”_

“Why not?”

“You’re not seriously asking me that.”

“No, I’m not. Fuck off.”

There was some kind of muffled scuffle, which could have been a disagreement between two people or between one person and a piece of obstinate luggage. The door opened. Hennessy found herself facing the spiky-haired boy from the photo on Adam’s bedside. He was a few inches shorter than her and clad in hideous clashing pajamas, with dark roots peeking out from under his egregiously yellow hair.

Hennessy shifted her weight to one hip and calculated the amount of force needed to shove past him.

His eyes widened. His mouth opened.

She allowed the silence to lengthen, just to be shitty.

“Holy shit,” the guy - Noah, she assumed - said. Then, quickly, “I mean, respectfully! Respectfully, _holy shit.”_

Hennessy considered herself a person who thrived with or without external validation. She liked external _attention,_ but she was also capable of running on gallons of sheer unearned confidence. Even so, this was the most gratifying reaction she’d prompted in days. A blessed return to normalcy. She wasn’t _Hennessy_ if traffic jams didn't occur when she walked down the street.

“Is she murdered.” Ronan’s flat voice floated out from behind the wall. Hennessy peered into the room and found him sprawled across the bed closest to the door.

“Not yet,” she clarified, helpfully. “I’m just hot.”

Ronan made a derisive sound. Hennessy chose to interpret it as derision toward Noah’s tragic susceptibility to women, rather than derision toward her objective hotness.

She was pretty sure this was the first time he’d seen her dressed the way she preferred, anyway. His lamplit expression was far from impressed, but she hadn’t expected him to be. It wasn't like she'd picked the outfit for Ronan specifically. The clothes just helped her feel more... centered. More controlled.

“Noah, get lost for a couple hours,” Ronan said. “Hennessy and I have shit to do.”

“I do not think this is a good idea.”

“Tough beans.”

“Does Gansey know about this?”

Hennessy arched an eyebrow. “Would Gansey _forbid_ it? What a fascinating wrench to toss into the works. Of all the people to hold your leash, Lynch, _him?_ I'm appalled.”

Ronan ignored her, which was fair. “Go ahead and tell Gansey if you want. We’re grown-ass adults. We’re not going to kill each other.”

“Probably,” Hennessy added.

Noah rocked on the balls of his feet, sucking his lower lip into his mouth. “What if I stay?”

“Absolutely fucking not,” said Hennessy.

There was no hesitation as Ronan added, “Scram.”

She liked that they were united in this. She supposed it _was_ possible for a mediator to facilitate the discussion. A mediator might even make the discussion more productive, for certain values of the term. The setup would curb some obvious disadvantages: Hennessy had not spent anywhere near as much time studying relationships as Adam had, and an irritated crash course from him did not explain the nuances, and compromise was not her strongest skill, and there was no guarantee that she’d be able to stop her anger from leading her, no matter how hard she tried.

But she didn’t want to adhere to someone else’s idea of a resolution. Just the same control issues that always dogged her, probably - except that this situation called for control. So fucking what if she offered unproductive sentiments? So fucking what if she led with her heart rather than her head? So fucking what if they arrived at an unconventional conclusion? She wasn’t about to censor herself. She might have tried, were the issue a simple matter of ego. It wasn’t. It was a matter of believing that her case had been understood; if she watered herself down, she’d never be sure.

She also liked that Noah seemed to consider her a threat to Ronan. That was most definitely the crazy talking. It felt good to be a threat. If she was going to bare her soul, she might as well have the upper hand.

Noah bounced again, glancing between her and the door, apparently weighing the benefits of further protest. Finding them negligible, he said, “I’ll be back this evening. Sooner if you guys want me. Okay?”

She _also_ liked that he’d positioned himself as a potential ally to both of them, whether or not the wording was intentional. “Duly noted, soldier,” she said, as Ronan growled, _“Out.”_

Noah ducked under her arm and pulled a set of car keys out of his pajama pants pocket. The fabulous Mustang blinked to life. 

What an unbelievable stroke of luck, to be fated to steal _two_ sexy cars from her soulmate’s loved ones. She’d devote proper time to an evil scheme once more pressing matters had been resolved.

She stepped into the room and pulled the door closed. Despite the bedside lighting, her eyes needed a moment to adjust. The curtains were drawn, and the shaded space had the breath-held hush of a morgue in comparison to the sunny day outside.

Ronan, too, looked like something that belonged to a morgue. Nothing had really changed about his complexion. It was more the way he watched her, with a deadened disinterest, the same numbness she experienced after too many sleepless nights. She flicked on the lights above the television, but that didn’t help. Rather than illuminating his gaze, the gleam reflected flatly. Only the shrinking of his pupils betrayed his consciousness. She could paint it, she thought. _Study of a Catatonic Sinner._ A blend of light and shadow, an optical illusion that detached the subject completely from its environment.

Whatever mood Ronan had been in before, Noah had taken it with him.

_I can’t do this. I don’t know how to do this. I never tried-_

Hennessy silenced the train of thought before she could spiral. Of course she didn’t know how to do this. Everyone who studied any skill had a first humiliating fumblethrough, including awful women who ought to have explored the basics ages ago. Besides, she didn’t have to do everything at once. One step at a time. One step at a time.

“You owe me an explanation, Lynch,” she said.

Ronan just nodded. At least he was paying attention. “Yeah.”

She waited. He tipped his head back against the wall without blinking. If she’d found some poor bastard strung out like this in the mansion, she’d offer a cigarette out of sheer pity. She squashed the urge now. Ronan was either exaggerating the sad boy act on purpose, in which case he wasn’t worth her sympathy; or the act was unintentional, in which case he wouldn’t want the sympathy to begin with.

When no explanation was forthcoming, she pursed her lips. “Perhaps _before_ I’m old enough to enjoy canasta.”

“I fucked up,” he said.

She grit her teeth. Then, remembering her mental pledge to be honest about her feelings, she said, “That’s not an explanation, mate. That’s just telling me what we both already know. But I'll give you a participation checkmark for the effort.”

“It’s taking responsibility.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I fucked up, it’s on me, I’m sorry.”

“I don’t really care that you’re sorry.”

He closed his eyes, mouth tightening. Great. They'd barely even spoken, and already Hennessy had swiped with claws. Without meaning to, no less. Maybe she _should_ have let Noah mediate.

“I meant,” she clarified, “that I care more about _why_ you did it than whether you feel bad. Anyone can admit wrongdoing. I’ve fucked around with plenty of people who understand morality after the fact, but never seem to care whilst the crimes are committed. Irritates the hell out of me. Serial promise-breakers shouldn’t playact remorse.”

“It’s not gonna happen again.”

“I want an explanation. I’m owed that much.”

“You’re owed more than that.”

She snorted. “Sweet sentiment. It’s nearly earnest. Utterly fucking empty, too, if you refuse to deliver.”

“I’m figuring it out. My brain-to-mouth muscle is fucking slow.”

There was no point in waiting for him to voice something she already knew. “Parrish told me about your dead soulmate.”

Ronan’s breath left him in a sharp exhale. His eyes squeezed more tightly shut, as though she’d hurled a projectile and the impact had taken him by surprise. Gone was the disconnected ghost; the announcement dragged him back to full awareness like electric shock, salted wound, burning skin.

Hennessy just barely stopped herself from whistling. No wonder Adam had been so insistent that she take care with her words. No wonder Noah had wanted to stay. A weapon this effective couldn’t be trusted in her traitorous hands.

She wanted to be trustworthy, though.

She _needed_ to be trustworthy, for any of this to work.

This wasn’t a conversation that Ronan wanted to have. Hennessy wasn’t even certain that it was a conversation she was owed. Dead soulmate trauma could provide an explanation without the nitty-gritty details. Ronan didn’t need to elaborate. She couldn't ask him to unstitch his wounds just to prove that he hadn’t meant her harm.

There was a part of her, though, that disagreed. Even if she wasn’t entitled, the pain would prove a point. How else could she ever accept his sincerity? He’d flawlessly filled the mold of a vengeful heartbreaker. She knew the steps of this dance. A playact of emotional support, a pretense of vulnerability, a gentle prying-up of the mark’s roots. A chance to give one horrible bitch a taste of her own medicine, an opportunity for righteous vindication. Ronan might have engineered every brick on the path to broken promises. Who would fault him? Hennessy was the villain of so many stories.

_Back off,_ she told herself. _You aren't here to be a sadist._

“I’d figured it most of the way already,” she explained. “Parrish just confirmed the theory. Largely because I was a pain in the ass. We didn't conspire against you, at least where dead soulmates are concerned. So you’ve got your explanation's start. No need to choke out the words, I’m not sat on the holy side of confession. Just tell me what the hell you think you’re playing at.”

“I told you I fucked up.”

“I trusted you,” she said. 

It was a test for herself as much as him. She needed to be sure that her voice wouldn’t quake. The worry proved unfounded; the simple statement of fact was imbued with the cold judgment of an angel at the gates of heaven. A damning oration of sin. She wasn’t sure whether the transgression belonged more to him or herself.

Ronan looked ill, a supplicant struck down by divinity. “I know.”

There was a painting in this, too, Hennessy thought. _Devotee’s Plea Before an Unloving God._ A better person would find less satisfaction in the image.

“This was not a misplaced action.” She reasoned through the facts and, to her own surprise, judged herself blameless. His transgression alone, then. She added, more confidently, “I am not at fault here.”

“Obviously fucking not.” He opened his eyes to glare at her, which was preferable to the bleakness. “Who the fuck told you that was on the table?”

“You _begged_ me to trust you.”

“Yeah.” Ronan’s mouth twitched, like he wanted to grimace, or maybe grin. “Sorry.”

“I don’t _care_ that you’re sorry,” she snapped. “Did you not hear me? The apology means fucking nothing to me. I want to know why the fuck you sought my trust if you only meant to break it.”

“I _didn’t.”_

“You didn’t break my trust?”

“I didn’t _mean_ to break it.”

It was not, Hennessy thought, the worst thing he could have done. After all, he hadn’t caused Jordan any physical harm or irreparable emotional scarring. The seeds of the damage he’d managed had been sown by Hennessy herself; Jordan would never have reached such a painful conclusion if Hennessy hadn’t habitually treated her like shit. The whole affair had apparently inspired enough guilt for Ronan to confess. If he’d confessed to _her,_ she might not have been angry at all.

But he hadn’t confessed to her.

He’d lied after promising honesty.

He’d decided she wasn’t worth the truth.

He’d _kept_ deciding that, with every single second that he let the falsehood fester.

A small action, to be sure. Very few ripple effects. Not the worst thing he could have done.

But that type of action was easily repeated.

“What, exactly,” she said, “were you trying to do?”

Ronan’s fingers curled into a fist atop the blankets. Hennessy considered sitting at the foot of his bed, but the proximity felt dangerous; she might succumb to her growing and annoying urge to hold him. She crossed to the other bed instead, perching on the covers and facing him.

“I was trying to help,” Ronan said, but all she heard was exhausted defeat, and she thought he might be struggling to convince himself. He was definitely struggling to convince _her._

“Not good enough.”

“I need to - I need a second, Jesus. I’m figuring it out.”

An ethical debate wouldn’t solve the problem. She could explain what he’d done, and he would apologize, and he would take responsibility, and he would put no name to the desperation that drove him, and he would hurt her again.

Hennessy knew the steps of this dance.

“Your soulmate killed himself,” she said. “I tried to kill myself. I’ll go out on a limb and say there’s a _fucking_ connection. Call me an armchair analyst if you must. Couldn’t find a heavier-handed parallel - no wonder your nightmares are back. You should have let me leave you, Lynch. I was ready to go. But no, no, you decide to wage a fucking morality crusade instead. You told me you had the strength to weather this, like a fucking liar. And here we both are, and we didn't need to be. So I’m _owed an explanation.”_

“I can’t do this,” Ronan said.

“Excuse me?”

“Not - not right now. Just not right now. I’ll explain everything once I - I’ll tell you - _fuck._ I can’t keep it the fuck together. You’re not dealing with that on top of - Jesus, fuck, I - I gotta go.”

She sprang up from the bed as he bolted for the door. His legs were longer, and he was closer, so he should have escaped the room by the time she caught up. But his half-drunken weave lent Hennessy an advantage. As he tried to turn the doorknob, she caught him around the chest from behind.

_“Fuck,”_ he snarled, his hand slipping on the door, his body useless and half-limp in her arms. He rested his forehead against the wood. His breath was jagged. “Fuck,” he repeated, voice breaking.

“Ronan.” She couldn’t contend with the wild energy inside him, not if he lashed out. And there would be no way to hold him up if he fell. She hugged him hard anyway. She didn’t know how else to keep him there. “Ronan, you owe me this.”

She still wasn’t sure this was true. But he sounded an awful lot like he’d chosen to spare her the spectacle, regardless of whether he desired isolation. Shutting himself away, exactly like he’d been doing the entire time she’d known him. It might have been awful for Hennessy to keep him here, but how else would she ever convince him to _stop?_ Someone had to be unwavering, now, and Ronan couldn't foot the bill.

“I _can’t,”_ he said, but at least he wasn’t trying to wrestle free. “I’ll hurt you.”

She almost laughed. She wanted to hit him; she was only stopped by the fact that hugging him seemed more important. “Give me the hurt I’m asking for instead of the hurt I’m not,” she said.

It was a magic incantation - the fight left him like an exorcised demon. She felt his surrender in the way he slumped against the door, a perfect halfway marker between “upright” and “collapse.” He pressed his forehead to the wood and released a single, plaintive noise of frustration. He didn’t snarl that she was being unfair, though he could have. He didn’t tell her that she was asking too much, though he probably should have. 

If he really wanted to be alone, Hennessy reasoned, then he could go. But he wasn’t protecting her by hiding, and she needed him to acknowledge that. It would have been a special kind of hypocrisy to refuse a request he’d made himself. _Give me the hurt I'm asking for._

“Fuck,” he muttered.

Then he turned and elbowed her aside, gently, using a fraction of his full strength to disentangle himself. He stomped back to the bed. “Fucking fine,” he snarled, as though to make up for the lack of animosity when he'd touched her. “You want a trainwreck? You can have a trainwreck.”

Hennessy tried to express pure vindication, but the relief made her weak-kneed. 

Checkmate.

Once she’d recovered from the dizziness, she evaluated his defensive posture. She couldn’t blame him for throwing up angry walls. She’d mirrored this exact sullenness plenty of times, faced by counselors and psychiatrists and concerned peers who weren’t paid enough to plumb her crazy. Ronan probably wanted to escape potential vulnerability just as badly as she always had. There was nothing natural about performing grief for an audience.

_Don’t fuck this up,_ she told herself, because she didn’t have enough bandwidth to gauge how badly she’d fucked it already.

“Good,” she said aloud, and hopped up to sit on his legs. It felt like the most casual method of house arrest. He could throw her off if he really tried, but at least he might pause before bolting.

“What do you want to know? What the fuck is there to know?” Ronan didn’t wait for a response before continuing, breathless, speaking faster than she’d ever heard. It was a voice that listed potential side effects at the end of a medication commercial - headache, skin irritation, nausea, organ failure, death. “Joseph Kavinsky, seventeen years old, drug addict, alcoholic, drug dealer, street racer, abusive father, coked-out mother, bunch of issues, dead now so none of it even fucking matters. Does that help? All the fucking statistics, the risk factors? Let’s treat this shit like a case file. There are your highlights.”

So, the same sad backstory shadowing most suicidal idiots, she supposed. Not enough love to go around, too many drugs that tricked the brain into warmth. No need to seek human connection with easier answers scrawled across the bottoms of bottles.

“And seventeen-year-old you didn’t manage to save him from himself. Largely, I presume, due to being seventeen. You were similarly-aged, yeah? That was the impression I got.”

“Seventeen-year-old me _killed_ him.”

Hennessy arched her eyebrows. A few days ago, she might have accepted this without question. Now she wielded just enough information to form a rebuttal. “Adam seemed fairly insistent that wasn’t the case.”

“Oh, _fuck_ me. Glad you two got into all the _fucking_ details, I’m sure that was really fun for you, God, I didn’t think he’d do this. Fuck. Fuck me.”

“Pull it together, Lynch,” she said sharply, snapping her fingers. “No need for all the hysterical assumptions. I merely asked him whether you’re a coldblooded killer, as one does, and he insisted that I not engage you in such an impolite topic of discussion. For reasons that appear obvious now.”

“No, I didn’t kill him. It wasn’t my fault.” Ronan’s head rocked back hard enough to crack against the wall. He dragged one hand down his face, imprinting fading finger marks underneath an eye. “I’m just fucking crazy. It’s fine. It happens. You’re also fucking crazy, you get it, I don't even gotta bother.”

Hennessy was nothing if not fucking crazy. Most of the blood on her hands _was_ her fault, though. She didn’t think that she and Ronan were cut from the same sort of cloth, at least where violence and guilt and ruthlessness were concerned.

“What makes you think you killed him?”

“Because I left him,” Ronan said. “And I was his only one.”

Oh.

Ice pricked Hennessy’s heart. “And here you’re given another chance,” she surmised, too bright. “Few individuals receive such a golden opportunity. Don’t want to squander the shot with a repeat performance, of course. Best to go the opposite extreme. Keep the girl close at all costs, never mind whether the course could kill you. That’s sensible, even, viewed in the right light. You should have told me from the start, bruv. No wonder you’ve been such a pathetic fuckup. Your judgment's compromised to hell and back.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not being cruel,” she said, and meant it. “I’m not trying to be, I mean. It’s good that I know now. I didn’t, back when you were asking me to be - whatever you were asking. The info would have changed my answer. I don’t need you, Lynch. I promise. Consider this an official release from your obligations.”

“What happened with him doesn’t have _anything to fucking do with you.”_ He was angry now. True anger rather than performative defense, too, as though the rage had been simmering and just needed a little more heat to boil. His lip curled, his shoulders tensing, his fingers snarled in the blankets. “I might’ve tripped over myself acting like an asshole, yeah, that’s on me, that’s my fault, whatever. It’s got nothing to do with you, none of it.”

“It has to do with how you perceive me,” she pointed out. She felt her tone was very reasonable, if still a little too bright and condescending, especially considering the way her heart had cracked in half. “I’ve been around this block before, Lynch. I’ve been the messy girl who reminds some messy fuckup of their messy ex. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun for fans of drama. Five stars, would repeat. But you don’t want to play that game.”

“No,” he said, “you don’t know what the _fuck_ you’re talking about. I’m not seeing him when I look at you. I’m not _wanting_ him when I look at you. You want to know why I left his sorry ass? He drugged my fucking _brother.”_

Hennessy processed this. She would have liked the information to separate her from the dearly departed - Evil Shitbag Versus Less Evil Shitbag - but she wasn’t sure she herself was above this kind of fucked-to-hell morality. Ultimately, that wasn’t important. Interesting, though, was that she understood a little more about past conversations with Adam: the way his jaw clenched when he spoke Kavinsky’s name, the way he'd mentioned Ronan's brothers last night, the way he’d observed _You’re more like Ronan than I first thought_ after she’d explained her loyalty to her sister.

“Not to be a giant bitch or anything,” Hennessy said, “but if you drugged Jordan and then offed yourself after I had a shitfit, I’d throw a fucking party.”

Ronan stared at her with an expression that she could only deem _incredulity._ Once again, she seemed to have snapped him out of a mental spiral through the sheer power of Being A Shithead. “Deeply fucking unhelpful,” he said, though he looked more like himself than he had all morning. “Thanks for that.”

“I’m just saying, you drop a bomb like that and I have trouble stringing together sad emojis for a eulogy. You've certainly heard it from everyone, but _yes,_ leave. Excellent move by Past Ronan. Curate a _playlist_ for that shit. Waltz out the door to the Potential Breakup Song.”

“I kept trying to work it out, is the thing.” Ronan laughed once, humorless. “Giant fucking mess. He didn’t like Gansey. He didn’t like Noah. I hadn’t met Blue yet, but he wouldn’t have liked her either. He thought it was really fucking sexy to be miserable together. Other soulmates got in the way, they took up my time, they got me feeling things he didn't feel. He liked being miserable. It was easier - _you_ know, you get it, you smash a bottle and fuck a stranger and puke in the bathroom and drug yourself senseless and it’s all fucking _easier_ than trying to sort your shit.”

Hennessy had partaken in her fair share of adolescent wastelands. She could picture exactly the kind of relationship that Ronan described. Glittery and exciting, violent and frantic, hollow and bursting. She’d watched plenty of girls wither in places they’d never be mourned, bodies noted and forgotten on charts, entire lives reduced to a sad-phrase statistic. The trauma had not broken her to pieces like it had Ronan, probably because she hadn’t been stupid enough to love any of them. Except for how she'd planned to become one of them. The ghosts of wasted potential could be ruthless in their hauntings, and they wanted what Hennessy had.

“Not on you, then,” she said dismissively, sealing away both Ronan's guilt and her own. “If he didn’t want it to work, it wasn’t going to work. Better you didn’t go down with the ship.”

“Yeah. So I’ve been told.”

Hennessy narrowed her eyes. “You don’t believe that?”

“Here’s the deal, okay?”

Ronan leaned forward, like he was sharing a secret. Maybe he was. This whole tragedy was the most private thing about him; she didn’t think many people had been allowed to witness his reasoning. 

“It wasn’t always the end," he said. "People always want to focus on the end, right, they want to make it this - this single isolated event. But it wasn’t always the end. There was a beginning and a middle and an almost-the-end. We were always fucking awful together, but it wasn't always _ugly_ awful. I didn't start to hate what we were until later. So maybe if I hadn’t been trying so fucking hard - maybe if I’d put my foot down for two fucking seconds _before_ I started hating him, maybe if I'd done a better job explaining what _unforgivable_ means, maybe if I’d asked someone older, maybe if I - God. Look. I was not good for him, beginning, middle, or end. I'm not a blameless victim here. I cannot express enough how _not good_ I was for him.”

“Do you think he still would have done it?” Hennessy asked, genuinely curious. “If you hadn’t been with him?”

“I don’t know. Probably. I sure as fuck didn’t plant the seeds. He was already fuck-deep into everything when I met him. Single-minded kind of bastard. I'm not sure I _could_ have been a shit influence. But I don’t know.”

Hennessy swallowed.

“I can’t think about it,” Ronan continued. “I get fucked up if I think about it. So I'm not telling you any more once I'm done. But there’s this - this image in my head, right, this other timeline where I give him an ultimatum way earlier. Where he has to drag himself through all the condescending teen therapy and he hates every second of it but it’s enough, or whatever, I guess. And I'm not the one who has to keep him breathing. And he makes it into his twenties, and maybe I keep being a hardass until I don't hate his guts, I don't know, okay? But it shakes out so he's still around now. And if I left his ass then I can look him up on Facebook when I'm in a shitty mood. Like how normal people are about their exes.”

He was shaking, now, the trembling visible in his shoulders and rippling through her body where their legs touched. Hennessy opened her mouth to tell him to stop, but he kept going before she could.

“And then I get fucked up about how I don’t know him,” he explained. “Because I’m sure as hell not who I was at seventeen, and he could've been so fucking many different people, and I’m never gonna know. You can't Google a dead guy like you can your elementary school classmates. You can't see who they're dating or where they're working or where they've traveled or whatever. So I don’t get to fix anything. I don’t get to know anything. There’s no resolution, there’s no therapy plan that’s ever gonna undo any of that. I’m never gonna fucking know who he would’ve - shit, fuck, okay. Okay. Okay. Okay, we're good. I've hit the limit. The physical limit. I am about to flip the fuck out.”

“Got it,” Hennessy said. She wasn’t sure she could stand to hear much more anyway, although she would have preferred he not work himself into a panic.

And panic he was. She recognized the hallmark signs of an attack - the gasping for air, the shaking, the sweat beading on his upper lip. She didn't have long before she lost him completely. Already his eyes were wild, darting around the room as if to plot an escape.

“Breathe." She leaned forward, laying her arm against Ronan’s chest and pushing until he folded back against the pillows. She pressed down with all her weight, his heartbeat rapid enough to feel through his shirt, his ribs expanding and contracting like a fluttering insect's wings.

“Fuck,” Ronan said, and dragged in a breath. “I’m working on it.”

“You need to exhale,” she said. “You aren’t exhaling.”

Ronan’s exhale was a half-second _whoosh_ followed by a much larger gulp of air. Hennessy rolled her eyes. “You stupid asshole. Your lungs are going to pop like microwaved grapes. Have you ever put grapes in a microwave? They make plasma. Deeply fucked up scientific fact of the day. Breathe. _Breathe._ Here, match me.”

He’d calmed her own anxiety before. She stole plays from his book - the weight against his body, the calm assurance in her annoyance, the steadiness of her breathing. She kept the rhythm slow and even, and after a few hyperventilated misses, he did manage to match her pace. 

Thank fuck. She didn’t know what else to do.

By the time he fully relaxed, she’d tired of holding herself up. She waited until he’d taken a few more normal breaths, just to be sure, and then flopped heavily against him.

“Oof.”

“I think I can safely say that I want the opposite of what your ex did, though I'm not a better human being,” she murmured, tucking her head against his shoulder. “I don’t want to take your other soulmates from you.” After some consideration, she added, “I don’t want to take your happiness, either, on any permanent basis. Temporary misery is alright, though. Sometimes you should go fuck yourself.”

Ronan laughed, a little, more tired and sad than mirthless. “I know. I got that. It's why I haven't kicked your ass out.”

“But you _were_ thinking about the past when you made me your promises,” she said. “And when you broke them.”

“Not consciously. I wasn’t thinking about it consciously. Well, maybe consciously. I don’t know. I fucking hate introspection.”

“It’s sort of important,” she pressed, “what you were thinking. You know that's true, because I only bother to care about other people's thoughts when they're important.”

Ronan was silent for long enough that she pulled back, prepared to deliver a diatribe. She paused at the look on his face: pensive, unhappy, resigned. Still present in the conversation. Struggling for an answer, maybe.

“I thought I could get it right,” Ronan said finally, in response to her silent query. “I wanted to be someone who could... and then I fucked it all up.”

“Someone who could what?” Hennessy asked, more gently than she’d intended.

He laughed again. “Keep you alive.”

Of course.

There was his whole problem, she thought. No force in hell could stop her from harming herself if she decided upon that course. The same had been true of his ex. Ronan could swear up and down that his feelings weren’t influenced by the past, but he’d already admitted to unresolved guilt. No wonder he was so willing to tear himself to pieces for her happiness - he’d lived through the worst potential outcome already.

“You told me you’d let me go if we couldn’t find a way to improve my quality of life,” she said.

Ronan made a sound like she’d driven a knife into his gut. “I-”

She clapped a hand over his mouth, cutting him off. “No,” she said, as his eyes widened, “shut the fuck up. I know. You considered it a lifesaving measure. A necessity. Then the dominoes fell - you realized I wanted my sister back, realized her goodwill would improve my mental state. You tried to make that happen. You fucked it all up, because of course you did. You didn’t want to tell me you fucked up when you were trying to convince me to survive. You thought I’d realize you didn't know what you were doing. So you lied. You figured the truth could wait until the stakes weren’t so high. Jordan’s pain didn’t factor in at all. Yeah?”

Ronan grunted. She was a little surprised he hadn’t attempted to bite her; she uncovered his mouth with a condescending flourish. "Your turn, my liege."

“I don’t think it was all that fucking calculated,” he said. “But probably, yeah, sure.”

“So what _were_ you thinking when you did it, then? If it wasn’t all that fucking calculated?”

“I think you’re overestimating the number of ‘thoughts’ I have.” He snorted, a little shaky. “I wanted one thing to suck less for you, okay? That’s it. It’s not that fucking deep. I just wanted to fix one fucking thing for you. Don’t let me talk to people, ever. See, that’s the thing I forgot. I can’t be fucking - _diplomatic._ Adam and Gansey both can, I should’ve asked them to help, I’m an _idiot,_ I forgot that was an option. And then I kept telling myself I’d done what you wanted, sort of, so it was fine.”

“But you must have known it wasn’t what I wanted,” she pointed out, “or you wouldn’t have lied to me.”

“Yeah. Must have.”

“And you decided I was better off with a lie than the truth.”

“Yep.”

“After telling me you don’t lie.”

“Mm.”

_“And_ after telling me I could trust you.”

“You bet.” This was a rasp. “Solid fucking work. Speedran the Broken Promise Gauntlet faster than every racer actually _trying._ It is fucking tragic that the Olympics won't add the sport to their lineup.”

He was being shitty, but Hennessy didn’t detect any flippancy in his actual tone. She believed that he was upset. The fact that he couldn’t approach the situation head-on just deepened her conviction; she nearly always ducked behind a joke when the subject matter wounded.

“So I can’t trust you when you say it won’t happen again.” 

She kept her own vocabulary carefully free of metaphor. If they both employed flippancy, they might lose the thread of connection, forget what they were talking about. The breach of trust hurt even more than the heartbreak had, but she did her best to establish her case with a pragmatic display of the facts. An organized argument deserving of Adam’s approval.

“Your words are essentially useless, as you’ve proven yourself a liar,” she said. “You decided that a lie was better for me. You made that choice. You consciously decided I can’t or shouldn’t be told the truth. I’ve no way of knowing whether you’ll make that decision again. You very easily could, the next time you feel the stakes are high enough.”

“It _won’t_ fucking happen again,” Ronan said. “I get that that means nothing, okay, I get that you won’t believe me, but I don’t know what else I can _do.”_

_“You_ don’t trust _me.”_

Ronan pushed himself up on his elbows, causing her to slide sideways. She shifted her leg to balance herself, lifting her head to study him. His eyes blazed with indignation. “I trust the fuck out of you, what the hell? I trust you more than I _should.”_

“You _don’t._ You think you’ve got to - got to take _care_ of me, like I’m too fragile to stand up straight, like I’m too mentally fucked to comprehend an ounce of your crazy bullshit. Knight in shining armor, aren’t you, all invulnerable and heroic, prancing in on your steed to save the fair maiden - fuck you, Lynch. You made the choice for me because you don’t think I’m competent to solve my own problems. You think you’ve got to protect me. You didn’t let me decide. I could have chosen a course of action, had you told me - I could have asked for your help if I wanted it! You didn’t _let_ me. Do you understand what that is to me? Another person controlling my reality - the things I know, the things I feel, the things I believe, the choices I make, any of that shit? My _worst fucking nightmare._ You might well have lifted the script directly from my subconscious. _You don’t get to do that to me.”_

The indignation faded, color leeching from Ronan's cheeks, turning his face ashen. He offered no explanations for this behavior, and Hennessy demanded none. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Yeah. You’re right. Shit's fucked up.”

She hadn’t expected an argument, but she was glad for the agreement regardless. If she did matter to him, she didn't think he would forget this particular lesson, and the potential for future strife would be lessened. She wanted, desperately, to believe that he harbored no ill intentions.

“You know what I realized yesterday, though?” She cupped Ronan’s cheek and smiled, genuine, almost kind. “I was thinking about you. Thinking about all the things soulmates do to each other. And this thing is _survivable._ I can survive this. I can _move on_ from this. I’ve been expecting a hell of a lot worse from my soulmate for a longass time. So in some ways, I’ve been high on the sheer fucking _relief._ It is funny, though. After I had a face to pair with the concept, after I knew who the soulmate was - somehow I expected a hell of a lot _better_ from _you.”_

He flinched. That was good. She’d meant for him to flinch. 

“Yeah,” he said again. “You’re not the only one. Expecting better of me, I mean.”

“You bit off more than you could chew, Lynch.”

His brow furrowed, but he didn’t argue. She wasn’t sure whether that was because he couldn’t articulate an argument, or whether he was too tired to care, or whether he was reconsidering his stance entirely.

“I want out of this relationship,” Hennessy said.

The words burrowed into marrow. Ronan’s face collapsed, his mouth crumpling at the corners, his breath sharpening, signals all the more pathetic for how hard he was fighting not to react. The ashen pallor hadn’t yet alleviated. Hennessy felt a curious twinge of something that might have been regret.

She’d broken hearts before, but she’d never cared enough to place herself in the other person’s shoes. Here, though, she'd apparently created an emotional investment. She didn’t like it. There was no way to know exactly what Ronan felt, but her body seemed intent on shuffling through possibilities like phantom pains. Maybe he was considering it cosmic retribution for what had happened with his dead soulmate. Maybe he’d been braced for the loss already. Maybe part of him was relieved - but she didn’t believe that, really. Of every reaction he'd betrayed, 'relief' wasn't one.

“Okay,” Ronan said. “Yeah, okay, cool. That’s chill. That’s fine. Let’s just - really quick, let’s figure out how to - how to make sure you’re okay, right, if I’m not... It doesn’t have to be a whole fucking thesis, just - a flowchart, fuck. I hate that I'm suggesting a flowchart. I fucking hate flowcharts and high school senior Ronan _will_ beat my ass for breaking the pact we made never to touch one again, but that’s fine. Just something quick. So you're not stuck by yourself. Okay? Is that cool with you?”

She fought down a grin. “A _flowchart?”_

“Listen, I preemptively hate everything about this conversation, just get me through this so you can escape in peace.”

This was what she’d needed. Not to humiliate him, although his increasingly apparent ineptitude at formal planning _was_ pretty fucking funny. Ronan couldn’t prove his good intentions while they worked together. Hennessy would never know whether her perceptions reflected the truth. There was still a chance that Ronan had manipulated her for selfish reasons, and that he’d continue to manipulate her to achieve his ends. The only way to determine his sincerity was to eliminate the selfish option - so she had to take away the thing he wanted.

If he cared for her like she wanted him to - cared about her happiness and choices and autonomy and future, cared in a way that prioritized her wellbeing above his wishes - he’d let her go.

And he was letting her go. Like he’d sworn from the start he would.

“I have a proposition, actually,” she said, “for a different relationship.”

Ronan laid back down against the pillows, his body tense beneath her, eyes wary. She couldn’t see an ounce of hope in the expression, not even cautious begrudging optimism. He didn’t know what she meant.

“Lay it on me,” he said.

“Everything you offered me,” she said, “and everything you gave me, except for the pieces that fucking sucked. But this time, we pave a two-way street. I offer you the same. You’re a fucking wreck, Lynch. No more swallowing your shit to protect me. I’m done. This is how emotional support goes, right? Someone reaches, someone else reaches back? Or takes a rain check? Reach for me. I promise I’m still a selfish bitch. When your neurotic breakdown conflicts with a sexy date night, I’ll ghost the hell out of you. Hoes before bros. Listen, man. It won’t work if we’re not in it together, fifty-fifty partners. If I’m just a stain to scrape off the pavement, I’ll never stop being a burden.”

“You’re not a fucking burden.”

“You need to fucking _trust_ me,” she retorted. “Because you’re having nightmares. Doesn’t matter that I’m the cause, here, guilt need not apply for the open job position. Point is, you’re obviously not as fucking adjusted as you’d have me believe. So I’m not staying if you won’t trust me. I don’t need to be sheltered. Or coddled. Fifty-fifty partners or I’m done. I refuse to wake up a year from now to find you’ve eaten a gun because I was too much and you wouldn't admit it.”

“Not to be an ass,” he said, “but I _have_ people I call when I need help.”

“Then don’t fucking call me for help. I don’t _care._ But you know what you _will_ do? You _will_ say, ‘Hey, Hennessy, I’m having an episode and liable to do some dumbfuck shit,’ when you’re having an episode and liable to do some dumbfuck shit. And then I’ll know, preemptively. Fifty-fifty.”

Ronan swallowed. “My episodes don't happen that fucking often. What’s this deal look like when I’m not out of my fucking mind?”

She laid both hands flat against his chest to experience his heartbeat. It was slower than before, but not yet slow enough to indicate a calm state of mind.

“Friend things,” she said. “Partner things. Cuddling. Ruining people’s days. Wrecking people’s cars. Shouting matches, I'm sure. Do you actually want me to get back to you with a top 10 listicle? Is that where we’re at?”

Ronan blinked slowly, like a cat. “Nah,” he said. “I’ll take it.”

“No counteroffer?”

“Nope, I’m good.”

“You’re a terrible negotiator.” 

It was hard to conceptualize the fact that she'd done what she came to do. No doubt there would be other discussions and fights, possibly until the end of time, but she'd done what she came for. The realization sank in slowly, warm and comfortable, like a bath. A smile spread across her face, and she sat up. The relief made her lightheaded. “All right. That’s settled, then. Partners.”

Ronan held up his pinkie finger.

Hennessy snorted. “Are we eight years old?”

“Sacred bond,” Ronan insisted. “Transcends age.”

She made a great show of rolling her eyes. But the lightness felt like a reward for all the shit they’d just muddled through, and the giddiness fizzed inside her veins like popping champagne, and the world did look a little brighter. There were worse indulgences.

“I want you to know,” she said, “that this is an exceedingly stupid way to commemorate something I proposed in earnest.”

“Absolutely.”

"All right." She hooked her pinkie with his and gave a firm shake.

“Partners,” Ronan agreed. She realized what was coming a half-second before he added, _“YEE-”_

Hennessy's first act under their newfound partnership was to shove a pillow over his face.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> adam seeks perspective from blue. they both manage to annoy each other terribly, but in a friendship way

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i return after another impromptu pause! 
> 
> turns out i relate to all these chronically ill characters because i have chronic illness. the crowd gasps in shock  
> i am hoping to update more regularly now that things are beginning to be treated! (but i will do my future self a kindness by not making promises.)

“So we worked it out,” Hennessy said.

Her voice crackled through Adam’s phone speaker as he took his morning fifteen in the lab’s empty break room. She’d texted twice already, but the ambiguity of the announcement seemed to warrant a phone call. Or at least, she’d called the second he responded, pleased that he was finally paying attention.

Adam popped a cup of ramen in the microwave and took a seat on the sagging faux-leather couch that was older than him. It was a staple of the decor. Other pieces might come and go, but the biohazard couch remained. He preferred this spot when he was on the phone because it provided an unobstructed view of the door; coworkers had a habit of accidentally sneaking up on him while his hearing ear was occupied.

“You worked it out,” he repeated slowly. “Right. You’ve been kinda vague about what ‘it’ is.”

“The whole... thing.”

“Okay, now you’re doing it on purpose.”

“The whole mess. Him being an idiot, me being a goddess who’s never done anything wrong in her life. We figured it out. Fifty-fifty partners. No more chasing each other down the drain.”

Adam hummed. “So what does ‘partners’ look like?”

“He fell asleep in my lap.”

Adam’s heart did something funny. It was the same kind of pang he’d felt seeing Ronan and Hennessy curled up asleep together. Not jealousy - a different, unnamed sensation. He wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“I had a fine-point Sharpie in my purse,” Hennessy added, “so I’ve been drawing anatomically correct dicks on his face for the past, uh... ninety minutes.”

Moment broken.

“Glad to hear you’ve decided to use your powers for good,” Adam said.

Hennessy laughed. “I’m also buying up all the pay-per-view specials. Not watching them. Just buying them. I think I’m three hundred dollars deep by now. I’ve gotten to channel 967. Apparently satellite is the only amenity this motel has going for it. One of those places people go to smoke, watch porn, and die.”

“You know I’d be really annoyed about this if Ronan and I shared a bank account.”

“Excellent news that you don’t, then. If he didn’t want me to bankrupt him, he shouldn’t have pinned me here. I got bored.”

“You two really are peas in a pod.”

A pause. “Yeah,” Hennessy said, “I think we kind of are.”

“So, the fight.” Adam couldn’t banish her rage from his head so easily. “All the graphic murder fantasies and whatever. Not to bring them up while the projected victim is in your lap, but I remember you being pretty, uh, impassioned. That all squared away, too?”

The other line was quiet for a long time, punctuated only by the sound of Hennessy's breathing. Long enough that Adam heard the angry beep of his ignored ramen in the microwave. He got up to retrieve it.

“If you’re strangling him,” Adam added as he returned to the couch with noodles in hand, “I’m not gonna be held liable just ‘cause I reminded you to do it. I plead the fifth.”

“I don’t think I’m angry anymore,” Hennessy said. She sounded - strange, hushed, like she was keeping quiet in a church or a mausoleum.

“You don’t seem too sure.”

“No, I... I’m sure I’m not angry anymore. Just not sure how I feel about that.”

“What happened to the anger?” Adam blew on the broth, even though he knew the sound would be deeply annoying. “Did he grovel? Or did he just look real pathetic? Sometimes he gets this bedraggled kitten vibe when he feels guilty. Gansey’s weak to it.”

Hennessy snorted. “You aren’t?”

“Only half the time.”

She laughed again. “I don’t think it was the bedraggled kitten vibe. It’s just - hard. To stay mad.”

Adam rarely had trouble staying mad at Ronan. It surprised him that _Hennessy_ of all people didn’t share this personality trait. “Oh?”

“Are you actually curious, here, or just humoring me?”

“Actually curious.”

Another long pause. “It’s hard when I - understand what went wrong, I suppose. I don’t know. I experienced empathy pangs earlier and it was fucking terrible. Would not repeat. Can’t tell if that’s a soulmate thing, or... I don’t know. It’s all odd. I don’t like it. Stop making me do introspection.”

Adam was pretty sure that Hennessy had the same intrinsic capacity for empathy that he did. Which was to say, none. Had she just _decided_ that she no longer felt the anger because she _thought_ she understood Ronan's experiences?

It was uncharitable, probably, to doubt that they’d sorted their shit. But Adam hadn’t witnessed the interaction himself. How could he be sure? Neither Hennessy nor Ronan was the type of person who verbalized sentiments with perfect clarity, and they were _both_ the type of person who focused on the Big Picture, and they wouldn’t know any fine details were incorrect until the next fight. 

The situation made him uneasy.

“I take it this means the end of our alliance, then,” he sighed. He did it as dramatically as possible, lest Hennessy believe he’d given a shit. There was nothing wrong with her choice to prioritize conflict resolution and her actual soulmate. The alliance had been set for expiration from the start. Adam wasn’t going to lose sleep about it.

“What? Absolutely not. You and I are the only motherfuckers on the planet who understand how fucking tragic it is to care about this asshole. Don’t leave me at the altar, Parrish, I need you here.”

 _“I’m_ not done being mad at him yet.”

“Well, _I’m_ no less delighted by causing problems than I was yesterday. The alliance remains.”

“All right. I’ve gotta finish my food and get back to work. Keep me posted on the dick art.”

“I’ll send you a dozen photos the moment I hang up. Ciao.”

Adam ended the call and turned his attention to his ramen. Unfortunately, the noodles weren’t interesting enough to interrupt his train of thought. Neither were the dozen promised pictures of Ronan’s be-dickened face - though they did give him further proof of Hennessy’s artistic skill. His mind wanted to analyze the circumstances, and he couldn’t tell how neurotic his conclusions were.

Hennessy had reached equilibrium with Ronan by confronting him. This was fair and reasonable. When Adam fought with Ronan, there were two potential resolutions: they came to a mutual understanding, or they ignored the issue until it ceased to be relevant. This particular conflict wasn’t ever gonna cease to be relevant. They were gonna have to talk about what had happened - nothing would feel better until they did.

But when Adam searched his emotions, he found nauseous fury. The anger had cooled since the initial fight, but not by much: it still had the radiating warmth of a sunburn. He didn’t want to see Ronan. He didn’t want to speak to Ronan. He tried to picture sitting down with Ronan and laying out his grievances and obtaining an apology, and the concept made him ill. This sensation was unusual - he rarely got so irritated with Ronan that he couldn’t be practical about it.

He felt kind of weird about how Hennessy had fixed her own Ronan problem.

He wasn’t sure why he felt weird about it. Probably, he surmised, because Hennessy was _Hennessy,_ and it was deeply unsettling that she might be more adjusted than Adam himself at the moment. That was, assuming she'd solved her drama as competently as she claimed.

In the span of the next hour, he managed to sort three separate patient files into three separate incorrect folders as he tried to compile data. The issue didn’t cause any major headaches, but only because a coworker noticed the error almost immediately. 

_Okay,_ Adam thought, looking down at the mislabeled chart in his hand, _I am apparently upset._

Inexplicable incompetence was almost always a sign that something was wrong with him. Whether the something was physical or emotional depended on the day. Sometimes it was the flu. Sometimes it was existential dread. Adam couldn’t always identify the markers from the inside, but in this case, he felt emotional distress was more likely than indigestion.

The most annoying thing was that the scattered mental state killed his ability to do his job. Fifteen minutes later, after mislabeling an entire drawer of samples, he decided to call it quits. Better that than setting the place on fire.

“Thank God it’s Friday,” he told Marsha, escaping during his lunch break. And thank God that the other researchers had the lab covered, and that he’d recognized his own limitations, and that he’d accrued enough PTO not to worry about a missed afternoon. He needed to sort this out before the weekend was over.

Now the question was what to do about the current upset.

Normally, the next step would be to talk to Ronan. Solve the problem. But that wouldn’t be helpful until Adam was prepared for the conversation. Adam could vent to Gansey instead - he’d been recently perturbed by Ronan himself, after all - but there was potential for tension. Both Gansey and Noah were too firmly invested in Ronan’s current wellbeing to lack bias. And Adam wasn’t sure what to _say._ He didn’t know why he was feeling any of the things he was feeling. He didn’t even know what he _wanted,_ and _want_ usually came easy to him.

But there _was_ someone who helped to ground him when he was scattered like this. He texted her: _Class/work today? Or can we meet by tree?_

The reply came two minutes later: _Sure I’ll drop everything to drive hours to sit in a tree by the highway. Mean that sincerely I'm missing her and so bored. Hope she has enough sun and food. What’s happening?_

_Fought with Ronan._

_Water is wet?_

_Miss you._

The three little typing bubbles appeared and disappeared a few times. Finally, Blue texted, _AWWWWWWWWWWWHHH. PUKES A RAINBOW. Here I come to save the day_

Impromptu meetups between Adam and Blue had become more frequent since discovering The Tree a year before. It was a giant spreading canopy that must have belonged to an old forest once. Now it towered in the middle of a clearing, located a five-minute walk down a wooded trail beside a rest stop. The boughs had survived through logging and flooding and innumerable storms, and the position midway between their apartments felt serendipitous.

To Blue, anyway. Blue liked making meaning out of mundane things. She and Gansey were alike that way.

Midway between the apartments still meant they were both driving three hours. Adam appreciated the bubble of calm during the journey. The brisk wind and sunny day cleared the scraps of clinging fog from his mind; he zoned out for most of the trip, and then he was dismounting at the stop.

The trail was built for dog walkers and unsurprisingly deserted at this time of day. Adam made his way to the clearing and found Blue already nestled in the tree. She usually arrived first. Her drive was about forty minutes shorter - or at least, it would have been if she wasn’t the slowest driver in the world. She never minded waiting; Adam sometimes suspected she was fonder of the tree’s company than his.

She was sitting on the lowermost branch, an arm hooked around the trunk to steady herself, her feet dangling in the open air.

“Having fun?” Adam called.

Blue swung out of her perch in a wide arc, until she dangled by her knees. The frayed skirt she wore inverted, but her tie-dyed leggings protected her legs from the chill. She reached down, pressed her palms flat to the ground, and sprang the rest of the way from the tree in an acrobatic pivot. As Adam drew closer, she stood up and wiped her muddy hands directly on his button-up shirt.

“I’m wearing my _jacket,”_ he said, affronted. “Could’ve used that.”

“Cotton absorbs better,” she replied, unrepentant.

Then she hugged him, fierce and longing and uncomplicated. Adam hugged her back. She was warm and solid in his arms, a settled weight, rooting his feet to the soil. “I missed you too,” she mumbled into his shirt, begrudging, and something tight in his lower back unwound.

Blue dragged him down onto the patch of hard earth beside the tree, heedless of the wet or the cold or the dirt. He didn’t protest. This was all the permission he needed to move closer. He turned onto his side and laid his head on her chest, the warmth filtering through even clearer, the rasp of his breath easing with the comfort. Her heartbeat drummed steadily beneath him.

For some reason, it was always easier to recognize his own exhaustion in Blue’s presence. The tiredness crept up on him, now, lulling him into a doze. He hadn’t even recognized how tired he’d been until he closed his eyes.

So maybe the work issues had been fatigue-related rather than upset-related. After all, nothing had made him _more_ upset today. He was just dealing with residual feelings following a fight with a partner. And residual unease following a separate resolution that hadn’t involved him. The resolution wasn’t even his problem; he didn’t have any business being uneasy about it.

Trying to articulate any of this would be useless. He’d texted Blue because he didn’t often _need_ to articulate perfectly with her. He just needed to let his muscles relax.

“How’s school been?” he asked, before she could ask about Ronan.

“Oh, I finally sorted out the whole nightmare with my internship hours,” she said. “So now I’m finishing by the end of the semester like everyone else. Like I was _supposed_ to. Before they gave me fifteen weekly hours instead of forty for no reason.”

This was excellent news; she’d been griping about the administration’s incompetence for six straight weeks. “How’d you manage that?”

“I got very firm with my adviser.”

Adam laughed. “Your poor adviser.”

“Well, I wasn’t about to shell out thousands to _do more unpaid work_ and _graduate late_ just because _they_ screwed up the scheduling. Henry helped. Wrote up a whole case about how my scholarship should be extended to cover the extra semester. Then they fixed the issue real quick. Almost like they didn’t wanna pay unnecessary tuition any more than I did.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.” Adam yawned. “I’m glad it worked out. Henry’s a genius and you’re a terror. Solid team effort all around.”

“I would’ve done it either way.” Blue hummed. “Finished the program, I mean. But at least now I don’t have to call home and argue with my mom.”

“About getting your degree?” Adam asked, surprised. This didn’t sound much like the Maura he was familiar with, but maybe circumstances had changed since he last saw her.

“About using Gansey or Henry’s money to cover tuition.”

“Your mom taking the side of...?”

“The side of ‘don’t ignore how privileged you are to have insanely rich soulmates.’ Even though it’s a load of bull.”

An insect chirped somewhere near them. Adam closed his eyes. This meetingplace always felt removed from time - tucked away from the roar of the interstate, chilly in the shade and warm in the sun, home to a tiny mostly-unseen ecosystem. Being out here made it a little easier to understand why Ronan needed to spend time in farm country.

“You could have just lied to her,” Adam said. “Told her they extended your scholarship, even if it wasn’t true.”

“I can't remember when I last got away with lying to her.” Blue ran her fingers through his hair. “Besides, I don’t want to lie. I want to tell the truth and then have shouting matches on the phone over how she’s an unreasonable tyrant and I’m a tragic martyr. Strongly worded letters, impassioned disagreements, all of that. Pretty sure that’s the whole point of a mother-daughter relationship.”

"You've just been spending too much time around Henry."

"Oh no, you're right. Don't tell him. His ego's big enough."

“What was the plan for financing an extra semester? More student loans?”

“If I _had_ to, then yes, obviously.”

“I could’ve helped you pay for it,” Adam said, though he knew this teetered close to a line. He only had more money than Blue because he’d finished school earlier, which was why he risked it. The two of them weren’t all that different where financial experience was concerned. “I mean, not all of it. But some. Rainy day fund.” 

His savings account was not that of a corporate executive or moneyed heir or millionaire retiree, but it existed, which was more than most people could say. A little of each paycheck went into the sum. He preferred to avoid dipping into the funds, more secure with a cushion of cash than a thousand purchased amenities, but he'd make exceptions.

Blue’s fingers ran through his hair again, scritching lightly. “I would’ve taken you up on that,” she said.

Adam tipped his head into her hand, encouraging more scratches. “But not Gansey or Henry.”

“Not Gansey or Henry.”

“Or Ronan, I bet.”

“Or Ronan. Or Noah.”

“So I get special poor person privileges.”

“Well, sure. You’d let me bail you out if you needed it.”

This was a very confident statement to make. Adam's eyebrows rose. “Maybe.”

“You _would,”_ Blue said, “because I’d kick your ass until you did.”

 _This_ Adam did not doubt. “Okay, sure,” he said. “Gotta band together against all these rich assholes.”

Blue laughed. “Why _are_ they all rich? I mean, statistically speaking, I think I should have _some_ average-wealth soulmates.”

“It’s the universe apologizing for everything else about them,” Adam said. Then he considered. “No, that’s mean. Noah’s fine. It’s the universe apologizing for everything about the non-Noah entities.”

“Wow. I have some really bad news for you where Noah and your rose-colored glasses are concerned.”

Adam hugged an arm around her waist, at least as well as he could while lying on the ground. “So I’m your _favorite._ Group Member Most Likely To Be Asked For A Loan. No higher honor. I want a bumper sticker.”

“Don’t act so smug, Adam Parrish,” Blue said, but without any heat. _“You_ don’t complicate my principles.”

“Because I’m a hick? Or because I’m not your soulmate?”

“Hm.” Blue rubbed her thumb over the nape of his neck, which suddenly made him realize he’d tensed up. He forced himself to relax. “Which is less offensive?”

“Whichever one’s true.”

“Both, then.”

Adam turned this over. He’d made the offer because of their camaraderie, not because of soulmate entanglements. Soulmate politics felt like a distinctly nefarious ulterior motive. After about ten seconds of internal examination, he said, “I think I’m annoyed.”

“About what?”

“I’m not sure yet. I’m just telling you. Keeping you apprised.”

“Okay.” Blue stopped rubbing his neck, which was good; further gentling would have annoyed him worse. “I wouldn’t _ask_ you for money. Just so we’re clear. I also wouldn’t refuse an offer. Don’t make the offer if you’re not willing.”

“I’m not annoyed about _that,”_ Adam snapped, huffing through his nose. “I just - look, all right. If I had money, _real_ money, like them, and I made the same offer - would you say yes? Yes to me and no to them? Because with me, it’s not coming from a soulmate?”

“Huh.” Blue sounded intrigued, as though pondering a new thought experiment. “I... don’t actually know.”

“Well, _that_ annoys me.”

“Well, it shouldn’t.”

“It’s not any different, me offering and them offering,” Adam said. “I can’t believe you’re going to make me die on this hill. I can’t believe you’re going to make me die on the hill of _defending rich people who wanna pay for all our stuff.”_

 _“I’m_ not making you die on any hills.”

“Do you see what you’ve done here, Blue? Look. Look what you’ve done to me. They’re gonna bury me on this hill with a little plaque that says I died as I lived: _encouraging rich people nonsense.”_

This, finally, made her laugh. Which was preferable to a full-blown argument. “I _know,_ Adam. We all love each other. We like making each other's lives easier. I am aware of this fact. Thanks for the reminder, though. _I_ am not the one who’s routinely stupid about this.”

Adam chose to ignore that last bit. “So then why am I _different_ to you?”

“Because you don’t come with _strings_ attached.”

Adam shifted his weight, pressing his arm against the ground so he could prop himself up on his elbows. He stared at her. It was a very long and unimpressed stare that found the subject wanting. She stared right back, unapologetic, but she was also the first to look away.

 _“Expectations,”_ she amended. “Obligations, whatever. They’re expected to offer, I’m expected to say yes. Obviously it’s love, right, it’s not obligation, we’ve been together forever, I’m not an _idiot._ But everyone else is thinking - oh, isn’t it so sad that they all got stuck with li’l’ old bumpkin me, that they _have_ to bring me into the fold, just - whatever. It’s all about stigma. _You_ didn’t _have_ to offer. No one expects you to. You just decided to. You’re not stuck with me.”

This explanation... made sense, at least. It was logical enough to ease Adam's budding anxiety. Blue wasn’t setting him apart as someone who was worth less - she was setting him apart as someone who wasn’t beholden to all the nonsense involved in soulmate expectations.

“Seems like a lot of fuss over what strangers think of you,” Adam observed. "So what if people think you're the odd one out?"

“It _matters_ to me.”

Adam couldn’t quite understand Blue’s relationship with people’s perception - her desires were so far from his own. She wanted everyone to know exactly who she was, at all times, no alternative interpretations. He didn’t want anyone knowing who he was or caring who he was. But he could relate to the gnawing terror of being the outcast.

All the same, she didn’t _have_ to be this weird about it. “I think I am still annoyed.”

“Sucks to be you, then.”

Adam laid his head back down on her chest, nestled between her collarbones. “Have you considered _not_ obsessing about what every Tom, Dick and Harry might vaguely think about you in passing?”

“It's not even about that. Just - let it be. Sorry I annoyed you.”

This was obviously not an argument Adam was going to win, considering both Blue’s defensiveness and his own lack of investment. He continued anyway, because he’d apparently lost all sense of self-preservation. “Everyone’s got soulmates, Blue. Except people who don’t, obviously. Everyone’s always gonna be making assumptions and acting shitty and being obnoxious and thinking things that aren't true. Don’t see why you’re keeping your soulmates at arm’s length about it.”

“I’m _not_ keeping them at arm’s length,” she snapped. “I just don’t like all the social expectations, okay? That is a normal thing. That’s normal. It's normal not to want to be pressured into pointless stupid stuff because of social expectations. And I don’t _actually_ like second-guessing everything about my relationships because I’m wondering how much we’re playacting and how much we're doing naturally. I don't actually like being weird and distant and not fitting with anyone's circles. It’s not actually fun for me, because I don't actually like fate that much. I know, shocker. Never-before-heard revelations about Blue Sargent. And, _actually,_ I retract my apology. I’m not sorry at all that I annoyed you. Or that I don't have an elaborate, unnecessary, neurotic code of honor dictating all my interactions with you. _Or_ that I don't worry about consequences when I'm around you. I’m unrepentant. Die mad about it.”

“God,” Adam said, “you really are impossible.”

“I’m not sorry.” Despite the apparent ire, Blue laid her hand back in his hair with the gentlest motion. Her voice softened. “You didn’t have to pick me. But you did. Because you _wanted_ to. Which makes this the least complicated relationship in my life. So, you get to be special. I'm discriminating against you specifically. _Die mad about it.”_

Adam grunted. “That kinda gave me genuine warm fuzzies and now I'm even more annoyed.”

“Die mad about that, too. You fought with Ronan?”

Right.

“Did Gansey fill you in?” he asked. “On what’s been going on?”

“He said Ronan needed him, but not much else.” Blue shrugged, a motion Adam felt more than saw. “I figured he fought with Declan. Because I am not allowed to get involved in Declan conflicts. Because I have 'a tendency to cause problems,’ according to _some people.”_

Adam laughed. Blue's natural talents did not lie in peaceful deescalation. A permanent ban from Declan drama seemed like a good call.

“No," he explained. "He met his last soulmate.”

“Excuse me?” Blue sat up so suddenly that Adam slid into a faceful of dirt. He pushed himself up with a pointed look of annoyance, which she either didn’t see or ignored. “Explain.”

“Don’t know how much there is to explain. It was an accident. They got off to a rocky start. She’s got... mental health issues.” He didn’t really want to repeat the entire soap opera; Blue didn’t need to know. “Her name’s Hennessy. Ronan messed up pretty bad with her earlier. They had a big fight. Supposedly they worked it out this morning. Or so she says.”

“I see.” Blue pried up a little sprig of clover beside her, beginning to peel the leaves apart one by one. “You don’t believe her?”

“I don’t know what I believe.” Adam drew a knee to his chest. “He messed up pretty bad with me, too. We _haven’t_ worked it out yet.”

“Why not?”

“‘Cause I’m mad as hell.”

Blue’s mouth twitched. “Well, if you need a vacation, you’re welcome to come sleep in Gansey’s room.”

This was, admittedly, tempting. Blue and Henry were mellow presences, even during times that Adam was _arguing_ with them. Which wasn't to say that either was the laid-back hippie type - they both just carried around an aura of calm that Ronan and Noah couldn't quite emulate. It was also possible that Adam was the only person who experienced this. And that it might have been related more to his own feelings than their energy. 

Staying with them would be nice, if he could get the time off.

But there was also a part of Adam that balked at the thought of leaving Ronan and Hennessy by themselves. _Why?_ Neither of them had any pressing need for him. They hadn't needed him to solve their relationship. Hennessy didn't actually need their alliance, regardless of what she might say. Ronan had Gansey and Noah to keep him steady. If Adam disappeared, nothing here would be lost. And if it didn't matter whether he left, why did the idea bother him so much?

Maybe he just thought that Ronan and Hennessy both needed a babysitter, as if Gansey and Noah and the power of being grown-ass independent adults weren't enough. After all, Adam had been an asshole throughout this entire ordeal - why stop now?

“I don’t need a vacation, I don’t think,” he said. “I just needed to talk to someone outside it.”

“Well, then, call me an impartial observer.” Blue lay back down, studying the arcing canopy of leaves above them. “How’d he mess up with you?”

“He wanted me to help him lie to her,” Adam said. “Context doesn’t matter. He thought I’d say he was in the right about it. He wasn’t.”

“Why _you?”_ She glanced at him, her brow furrowed, mouth pressed into an indignant line. Indignant on his behalf or indignant about Ronan's piss-poor planning, Adam wasn't sure.

“I don’t know. I’m a bastard, I think the ends justify the means, I’m good at lying, I want him happy, I don’t care about anyone, I take the most convenient path - pick whichever.”

“That sure is an array of wildly different reasons.”

“You see the problem.”

“I’m not sure I do, actually?" Blue's frown deepened. "You can literally just find out which reason it is. By asking him. And, not to be a Ronan apologist here, but I’ll _bet_ it’s one of the less terrible options.”

“I don’t want to talk to him.”

“Should I... talk to him for you?”

“No!” Adam covered his face. “No, you’re not my _mom._ I just mean I - I don’t want to face him right now. I’ll deal with it later.”

The frown deepened even further, creasing Blue's entire face. Her glance this time was quick and furtive, as though checking for warning lights. Then she returned her attention to the leaves overhead. “Did _you_ mess up? Like, did you... agree to do it?”

“Of course not. I told him to go to hell.”

“So then why are you scared of facing him?”

 _“What?_ I’m-” Adam bit his tongue halfway through the protest, because a few pieces clicked suddenly into place. Maybe the icy, nauseous feeling in his gut _was_ more than residual anger. Certainly it was driving him to avoidance, a pattern executed the same way he avoided sinkholes or cliffs or contact with his parents. He didn't feel anger toward any of those things. Just wariness. A healthy appraisal of potential danger.

He searched, came up empty. “I don’t know.”

“Might be important to figure out.”

“I’ve just been having - having a weird time with everything. It’s nothing. I’ll shake it off.”

“Adam.”

“I don’t _know,_ okay?” His voice cracked, which was humiliating; he'd been fine twenty seconds ago. At least Blue had seen him cry plenty of times. It wasn’t like she'd judge. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Blue held her arms open, an invitation. He tucked himself against her side without question, hiding his face in the crook of her neck so she couldn’t see the flash flood of tears. Never mind how wet they’d be on her skin. “This is so stupid,” he said. “I literally don’t understand what I’m crying over. It’s just happening. Give me a minute, it’ll pass.”

“What was the lie?” Blue asked.

“Mm?”

“The lie he wanted you to tell.”

Adam explained the shape of it, keeping the account as brief as possible: Inform Hennessy that her sister wasn’t heartbroken, even though she was. Make Hennessy happy enough not to kill herself, even though she wanted to. Keep Hennessy from ever learning that the heartbreak was Ronan’s fault, even though they couldn't hide the truth forever.

“Oh,” Blue said, once he’d finished. “Yikes.”

This made Adam laugh, a gross and snotty sound. “Yikes indeed,” he replied, wiping his eyes on her shirt as the tears eased. “It’s fine. It’ll be fine. I’m fine. I’m good now. Crying releases endorphins, establishes equilibrium in the body. I'm all set for six months.”

“That wasn’t okay, though.” Blue hugged him tighter. “You get how that wasn’t okay, right?”

“Uh, yes. I _am_ aware that you shouldn’t lie to your soulmates after you destroy their relationships with their close family members. I’ve actually been in this corner the whole time. Was that unclear?”

“I meant the way he came to you about it. That wasn’t okay.”

“I know.”

“He made Hennessy more important than you.”

“What?” This didn’t quite track. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, aside from the whole active crisis thing. Which, whatever. Active crisis. You know. Priorities.”

“No,” Blue said. “He came to you like, ‘Hey, I don’t care what matters to you or how you feel or whether this might hurt you, but I need you to enable me really quick.’ Using you to get something he wanted. Because he was focused on her. The plan backfired, obviously, but it’s - I don’t like it at all. He knows better. You deserve better.”

Was _this_ why Adam felt so sick about the conflict? He wasn’t certain whether he agreed with Blue’s assessment of the situation. Ronan hadn't really treated him unfairly; all he'd done was bank on Adam having a more stubborn streak of callousness than he actually did. Anyway, that was the asshole behavior of a traumatized person who was definitively backsliding. It was _not_ behavior that warranted fear of confrontation. It wasn’t like Adam ever worried that Ronan might act violently. It wasn't like he ever worried that Ronan might cut off his finances or ruin his friendships or destroy his stuff. The nausea didn't make _sense._ Adam was only ever afraid of things that might hurt him.

Oh. Well.

There it was.

Aside from the tiniest wobble, his voice sounded completely normal when he spoke. “It’s gonna be so embarrassing,” he said, observational and detached and chill, “if it turns out I’ve just wasted all this time.”

“What time?”

“Hennessy got on my case about sticking by Ronan the other day. It’s gonna be so embarrassing if I - if he - God. Can you imagine? If I spent all this time preaching about how soulmates don’t matter because people make their own choices, and then it turns out I _actually did_ make the wrong ones? I'll never live it down. Literally no end to the mortification. I’ll have to print some kind of retraction, just like, hey, don’t mind me, turns out I was worthless the whole time, and in conclusion don't ever listen to your heart. Your heart is a stupid bastard. Abandon all hope, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Adam.” Blue patted the back of his neck with an open palm, as if trying to rouse him from slumber. “That is _not_ what I meant. He _does_ know better. He loves you to pieces. You also happen to deserve better than what he did, because he was an asshole. Many things can be true. Multidimensional creatures and all that.”

“No, it’s not what you said. It’s okay. It’s not what you said. It’s just-” Adam caught his breath. “I, uh, don’t really know what I’d do, is all. Without you. All of you. I don’t really - I don’t have much else that, uh, matters, or whatever. Just this. So. I just think it would be really funny if it turned out that - that the reason I don’t have soul marks is ‘cause all this wasn’t mine to start with. Like. Obviously. Obviously it wasn’t. The whole universe _told_ me that right from the beginning, so it’s not even, like, a betrayal.”

“Okay, I see you’ve decided it’s nervous breakdown time. Okay! You just went zero to one hundred faster than I have _ever seen you do._ Do you _know how many nervous breakdowns I've watched you have._ Adam. Take a breath. Before I kill you.”

“I’m working on it,” he said calmly. “I’m just as irritated by this as you are, trust me. I can see myself in third person right now. Narrator's making all kinds of disparaging comments. Could’ve picked a better place to spiral, somewhere with less mud, more pillows. I never figured out how to live alone. Did you ever realize that? I meant to, back in high school, that was the _entire point,_ and then we-”

“Okay,” Blue said. “Okay. Shut up. Shut up right now. Stop talking and just look at me."

Adam did.

"I can't believe you. Okay. You're on like five extra spicy ramen packet levels of losing it. So, okay. I’m gonna tell you what will happen if, somehow, a _single fight_ with _Ronan Lynch_ somehow means the _permanent end of your relationship._ But first, look me in the eyes, you need to acknowledge _how absurd that sentence is.”_

“You’re telling me you’ve had conflicts with Ronan Lynch that _didn't_ end the world?”

“I know. Earth-shattering revelations. Now shut up and listen. Are you listening to me? I can be gentler, I think, if you need it, I'm just better at this right now because you're _driving me crazy.”_

“Mean Blue is fine. I'm driving me crazy, too.”

“Okay. So. Here’s what happens _if_ you lose Ronan.”

She ran her hand down his back, then rubbed between his tense shoulder blades. “You move in with one or more of us, right, or we move in with you. We shuffle around the apartment situations. We do that all the time, it's not some massive hardship. Maybe you take your vacation days and travel with Noah for a few weeks. Maybe you go home to see my family and sleep on the couch for five straight days. You just do whatever you need to do about it, and then the rest of us are here whenever we’re wanted. _I’m_ here. I'm kind of offended that you think I wouldn't be? I’m not jumping ship just because I have Ronan’s feathers on my back. If the pseudo-divorce is somehow messy enough to need an awkward custody arrangement, then so be it. Worse people than us have managed.”

“An _awkward custody arrangement._ Why would you say it like that.”

Blue ignored him. “Gansey will be with you and Noah will be with you and Henry will be with you. And if you’ve already decided you’re doomed to lose them for some arbitrary reason, then fine, whatever, fine. I can’t speak for them, I only speak for me. But I will keep loving you and my mom will keep setting you a place at Thanksgiving and my door will keep being open and I will keep asking you basic questions about cars because search engines suck and I will keep needing you to fix my car after I break it worse while trying to fix it myself after you answered my basic questions and you will _keep being my best friend._ And I won’t let you be alone. Mostly because you are the kind of person who’d become a supervillain if left to your own devices. So I owe it to the world to make sure you go outside sometimes. You’re welcome, Earth. Okay?”

Adam's laugh was only a little strangled, which felt like an indescribable achievement. "Okay."

“I won’t let you be alone.”

“Okay.” 

"I won't. And if you decide you're gonna live on your own _while we're all still part of your life like normal_ , I'll make you get a cat. Problem solved."

He released a shuddering exhale. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. I’m done being insane now. Just needed to run its course for a second.”

“Talk to Ronan, you giant idiot.” Blue rested her chin on top of his head. “The world is not gonna end. He loves you. So do plenty of other people. Did you know you catastrophize worse than anyone I've ever met? You have to have the actual conversation. Your brain can’t do all the talking for him. It’s even ruder than he is.”

Adam tangled one of his legs with hers. “Sometimes you’re wise.”

“Sometimes _you’re_ so _stupid_ that basic common sense looks like wisdom.”

Adam smiled, wan. His head was swimming, though whether that was from the crying or the panic spiral or the relief was hard to say. He did feel a little less sick now. No telling whether that would last through the confrontation with Ronan. But it was good to know that there was still someone waiting to catch him if he fell. 

“Yeah," he said. "Fair enough."


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> adam aggressively confronts some feelings  
> gansey is aggressively told about some feelings

In actuality, Adam’s talk with Blue led to multiple curious, contradictory effects.

As he made the drive home, he noted that most of the acidic burn in his gut was gone. No wonder he hadn’t been able to rationalize away the anger before - it hadn’t been anger at all. Identification of the actual emotion proved much more helpful. His mind, too, was a hell of a lot clearer; the distracted fog dissipated like mist in the rising sun. If anything, his focus had narrowed to a point of razor precision.

This was the first potentially hazardous effect. Focused introspection was, for the most part, a problem-solving tool. Adam had no qualms about tearing apart his inner machinations the same way he would the mediocre first drafts of his classmates back in college. There was no room for compromise here.

And it was a long drive home.

The thing was, thanks to Blue, Adam had also identified the rationale behind the fear. This made resolution easy: once the core of the issue had been addressed, the fear would go away. So he should have been working through a plan to approach Ronan, communicate his needs, understand Ronan's needs, sort their shit.

But he also couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d told Blue. _I don’t know what I’d do without all this._ The breakdown had come on suddenly, sure, but it only held so much power because it was true. Every time he tried to imagine the shape of his life without the others, the nausea clamped back around his stomach.

The thing was, Adam had not ever acknowledged this aloud. He hadn’t even let himself _consider_ it, let alone dwell on the possibility. He’d maintained a firm principle of independence and detachment for as long as he could remember.

So he couldn’t stop thinking about how no one knew that he was a liar.

The thing was, Adam didn’t think he’d actually accomplished anything by holding people at arm’s length.

The thing was, Blue’s restored internship required heavy weekend commitments, so she couldn’t accompany him home, so there was no one to stop him from pulling into a Starbucks drive-thru and chugging seven shots of espresso in the parking lot.

Coffee made far better liquid courage than alcohol ever had. When Adam decided to address a problem, he addressed it. He committed to the course. He didn’t half-ass his projects. If he needed extra energy to manage, then so be it. Coffee had never failed him when writing midterm papers, so surely it couldn’t fail him now.

It was about an hour after this decision that Adam parked the bike below the apartment complex, which meant the caffeine was hitting him so hard that he could hear his own heartbeat.

He made his way upstairs, entered the unit, hung his jacket on the hook. “Who’s home?” he asked.

Gansey looked up from the couch nest. He’d curled up underneath the lamp with a book and his wire-framed glasses and a pair of fuzzy slippers, like a cozy model in a bedding advertisement. “Just me. I saw Noah earlier, but he returned to the motel not long ago.”

“What about Hennessy?”

“Last I knew, she was with Ronan.”

“That’s great news,” Adam said. “Just a heads-up, I’m about to be transparently insane. Thank God you’re the only one home. Imagine what would happen if Hennessy saw me acting human.”

Gansey marked his place in his reading with a thin bookmark that Adam recognized. It was a cheap laminated image of a sword bisected by a pen, a kitschy mass-produced trinket Adam had found in a bookstore a few years back. He’d bought it on impulse. _It came off a spinner rack, it was like two dollars,_ he’d told Gansey at the time. _Just made me think of you._

Gansey had the means and the motive to purchase much nicer bookmarks. This one had no value whatsoever, except for the fact that Adam had given it to him.

God. How many other details did Adam routinely ignore? How many threads had woven his presence through the lives of his family without his notice?

He felt distinctly unstable. It was a different instability from the one that had propelled him toward Blue, but the turbulence was no easier to quantify. Gansey might have seen the cracks on his face, or he might just be taking Adam at his word, because he asked, “Do you need to sit down?”

“Probably, yeah. Actually, definitely, yeah.” His legs were wobbly. Aside from the coffee, he hadn’t eaten since lunch, a fact that was now making itself known. He sank onto the far end of the mattress, willing himself to steadiness. “I’ve had enough caffeine to kill God and I need to talk to you.”

“Do you want to come over here? Or do you need space?”

This cautious approach was a sure sign that Adam looked unsettled. He wanted to come over there, so he kicked off his shoes and scooted to Gansey. Unsatisfied by the closeness, he lifted Gansey’s arm and pulled it around him, leaning into the warmth.

“You’re trembling,” Gansey observed, because Adam’s body betrayed him.

“Seven espresso shots.”

_“Why.”_

“Like you’ve never had seven espresso shots.”

“I most certainly have,” Gansey said, “which is why I’m in the perfect position to judge.”

Since Adam had introduced himself as a walking catastrophe, he wasn’t sure how to circle back to rational discussion. There were wiser approaches, probably. Too late now.

“I left work early today,” he explained. “My head wasn’t screwed on straight. Went to see Blue instead, met her this afternoon. Just got back. You hear anything from her?”

“I haven’t heard any gossip, if that’s what you’re asking. Is everything all right?”

“With Blue? Oh, yeah, we’re fine. She’s fine. She’s great. She actually gave me an epiphany, I realized something pretty important. Then I realized it was gonna bug me if I didn’t tell you I’d realized something important. So. Seven shots of espresso.”

“I must admit," Gansey hedged, “that I am picking up a certain degree of manic energy at the moment.”

Was _this_ what Ronan’s mania felt like? God. Adam couldn’t imagine doing this every few weeks, or even months. One caffeine-fueled nervous breakdown per decade was already too much.

He knew what he had to say, but he didn’t know how to say it, and he didn’t know how to connect the dots into a coherent thesis. What came out of his mouth instead was, “Hennessy thought you and I were soulmates.”

Gansey stiffened; his arm went rigid around Adam’s shoulders.

“Did you know that?” Adam asked.

“I never told her-”

“No, no, I’m not upset. It's not an accusation. Relax.”

Gansey exhaled slowly, as if allowing himself time to think. Adam leaned more firmly against him. “I promise I’m not starting shit with you,” he added. “I promise that’s not what I’m being insane about.”

“All right. No, I did not know that Hennessy thought that.” Gansey frowned. “Was that the epiphany?”

“No. I just wanted to know if you could tell. If you could read the assumption, I mean. ‘Cause it took me by surprise.”

Despite Adam’s reassurances, Gansey’s brow creased. “If I’ve been - too affectionate in front of her-”

 _“No,”_ Adam interrupted. “No, no, stop. You have not been too affectionate. I’m fine. I have no problems with you or with your affection. Zero problems. None. You hear me? If you start withholding affection ‘cause you’re not hearing me, I’m gonna be pissed.”

Gansey’s next exhale was far more natural, his shoulders slumping. “I have not been too affectionate,” he summarized. “Good to know.”

Adam nodded. “Okay, look. I screwed this up already, coming at it like a hurricane, I should’ve - I might've had too much caffeine. Didn't know that was possible. Okay. Forget everything I said so far. I wasn’t trying to be a confrontational dick. I just need to tell you something and I don’t know how, so please give me the benefit of the doubt.”

Gansey nodded without question, as if Adam was making any sense at all. “All right. What’s on your mind?”

What was on Adam’s mind was the last conversation that he and Gansey had had about soulmates: Gansey’s careful diplomacy, Adam’s surprised hurt, their shared confusion and stumbling miscommunication. He was thinking about Gansey’s belief that Adam could and would run when the impulse struck. He was thinking about how that belief was built on a foundation of lies.

Gansey had spent all these years reassuring Adam that he wasn’t going anywhere, and Adam had spent all these years obsessing over his own independence. He hadn’t bothered offering anyone the security of a promised future. As if promising to be here a week, a month, a year from now would slam a trap shut.

Blue had accused him of being scared to confront Ronan. Adam kind of thought the fear went deeper than that.

There was no way to articulate it, though, not when the terror was abstract and complicated and rooted unyielding in his marrow. Instead, he found an objective fact amongst the snarl of worry, a concrete detail he could relay free of uncertainty. “Did you know I was in love with you for all of high school?”

Gansey froze. Adam tilted his head back to analyze his expression. More deer-in-headlights than braced for a fight, he thought. Probably Adam should have considered that the objective fact was a potential bombshell; it hadn't occurred to him, since Gansey already knew that present-day Adam loved him.

Gansey opened his mouth, but no sound escaped.

It was probably rude, Adam thought, to drop this on him with no context. But it was also absurd that Gansey didn’t _know._

“Was,” Gansey managed, and then cleared his throat. “Was _that_ the epiphany?”

Adam almost laughed. He wasn’t quite _that_ clueless about his own emotions. “No.”

“I.” Gansey tried to clear his throat again, except he choked on his own spit and had to turn his face away to cough. Once he’d recovered, he said, “I was not aware of this, no.”

“I started thinking about it on the way home. Three hours to drive, way too much time listening to myself. And I realized you must not have known. Of course you didn’t know, it’s not like I _told_ you. So I’m telling you now.”

“Okay,” Gansey said slowly. “Why?”

Adam took a few moments to consider his answer. The events of high school had little bearing on who either of them was now, but the circumstances fit into a broader framework. “It’s just messed-up for you not to know,” he said. “I was wrecked for like two straight years. I was _messed up._ And you probably think I just didn’t give a shit.”

This wasn’t about high school. Gansey probably knew it wasn’t about high school. Adam was grateful that he upheld the pretense, though, his brow creased, his mouth flat. “What do you mean, _wrecked?”_

“I don’t know. Just wrecked. It's kinda self-explanatory.”

“It’s not.”

Adam grimaced. “I was following you around like a lovesick puppy. Like a _pet._ It was pathetic. I even knew it was pathetic, and I couldn’t stop doing it. You've got no idea how humiliating the whole thing was.”

Now Gansey’s mouth pulled downward in pain, like Adam had smacked him. “You _weren’t,_ though. You weren't pathetic. You haven't ever been. Jesus Christ, Adam. If anything, _I_ was the one following _you.”_

Adam shook his head, dismissing the argument. “I _felt_ like I was pathetic, is all. Actually, at the time, I thought you knew. I thought everyone knew. I thought I was so obvious. No self-respect, no accomplishments of my own, no future - I thought everyone could smell it on me. God, being sixteen was horrible. Never let me be sixteen again.”

“I didn’t know. I would never have wanted-” Gansey closed his eyes, his arm tightening around Adam. “You - you know now, don’t you? That that’s not how things were? That’s not what you were to me.”

“I know. I was stupid, I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know how any of this worked. I just knew I wanted to _keep_ you.”

“Keep me how?”

It was easier for Adam to explain the old feelings; they’d calcified into history, a factual narrative, a series of bare-bones remembrances.

“I loved you so much I was sick over it. Like, I seriously spent every day thinking I was gonna puke. I’d try to figure out whether I had enough time to grab my books _and_ hurl in the bathroom between classes. It sucked so much. I couldn’t give you up, either. That sucked way worse. ‘Cause you were gonna walk away first, and I’d be ruined when you did. I couldn’t figure out what you’d done to me. I couldn’t figure out _why_ you’d done it.” He took a sharp breath. “Anyway. Turns out you didn’t do it on purpose. Turns out you didn’t even _know_ you were doing it.”

Gansey had stopped breathing. Or at least, if he was breathing, it was too shallow for Adam to tell.

“I got to thinking about how you didn’t know,” Adam said. “How that whole time, you didn’t know. You didn’t know I couldn’t make it. That’s the most messed-up part, see, I was _never_ gonna make it. Before I met you, I couldn’t make it. Without you, I couldn’t make it. But I was so _convinced_ I could, I kept telling myself - as if I was ever gonna be anything other than this. It’s not really a warm and fuzzy feeling, right, it’s not - not built for a Hallmark card. I'm sorry. I can't tell you it didn't suck. I was so freaked out all the time. And you still think I could’ve walked away - you probably think I could’ve _graduated_ without you, God. God. It’s so messed up that you don’t know.”

“You felt-” Gansey took a shallow breath. “I see. I may throw up myself. Please forgive the dramatics.”

There, that dismay, was a perfect encapsulation of why Adam had never talked about this. “No, listen. Listen. It wasn't _bad._ You weren't bad. I just hadn’t loved anybody before, is what I’m saying. Okay? I hadn’t ever felt like that before. It wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t on you. I didn’t know how to cope with feeling like that. I didn’t _like_ it. I wanted to stop being so needy. Wanting it didn’t make me any less needy. I’m _attached._ That’s the thing, see, Gansey, you think I can just _opt out_ and I can’t. I can’t.”

Gansey swallowed once, hard, and nodded. "All right. I think I'm following."

“So it’s messed up. I chose everything here, right, I made good choices, but I always had to choose a family. I had to. I can’t opt out. I can’t just... unsubscribe from the mailing list. And it’s funny, ‘cause the lack of attachments is the _one_ advantage of not having soulmates, so I’m screwed. It’s a joke, basically. It’s all a joke. I’m not actually independent at all, here. I’m just not good enough to - shit, sorry, no. That's not where I was trying to go with this."

Gansey shifted, wrapping both arms tight around him, burying his face in Adam’s hair.

“I just didn’t know what to _do,”_ Adam said, breaking, and there were the tears, like a hug was all it took to undo him. “And I still don’t. _That’s_ the epiphany. I still don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to live without it. I don’t know how to be by myself. And I thought it was really weird that” - he screwed his fingers up in Gansey’s nightshirt, embarrassingly aware of how much snot was getting on the fabric - “that you didn’t know. Because it’s kind of a big deal. That’s all.”

Gansey held him in silence for several long minutes. The quiet was okay. Adam appreciated that Gansey was weighing his words before speaking, avoiding the insincerity of a hasty reassurance. Then, as Gansey took a raspy breath, Adam recognized the actual reason for his hesitation.

So they could both snot on each other like a pair of angsty adolescents. Whatever. It might be embarrassing later, once Adam had calmed enough to pick the interaction apart. But for now the reaction seemed warranted.

Finally, Gansey mumbled, thick enough that Adam strained to make it out, “I would love you until the sun swallowed the Earth if you’d let me." Another raspy breath. "I would take away every bad thing that’s ever happened to you. I would build you a house with my bare hands. Although it would admittedly take many years, because I would also need to acquire several new skillsets in the process.”

Adam hiccupped a laugh. “Or you could, y’know, do something actually useful with that time.”

“I would give you everything, Adam. You utter miracle. I could not stop loving you if I tried.”

“That makes it sound like you _have_ tried.”

“I would never,” Gansey said, genuinely horrified. Then, slightly condescending, “Are you aware that humans need connection to thrive?”

“Yes.”

“There are multiple psychological and neurological studies proving it.”

“I'm a college graduate, Gansey.”

“So it makes sense that you would need to build a family - would need outside support. Every human being needs those things. Including human beings without soulmates.”

There had been a time when Adam would argue with this. Hell, he might have argued with it last week. Certainly a human being wouldn’t shrivel up and die without contact, not the same way they would without food or water or air.

But it was also kind of hard to deny that this panic felt exactly like the fear of suffocating or starving or drowning. Adam did not want to exist without his loved ones. He would do what was necessary to avoid existing without his loved ones.

“Maybe I’m not actually a human being,” he said. “That's good news. It means my reputation around Hennessy is safe.”

The urgency had passed. His tears had mostly dried, and the raspy edge was gone from Gansey's breath. Instead of dignifying Adam's statement with a response, Gansey asked, “Do you remember the time I told you I think of you like a soulmate?”

Now it was Adam’s turn to tense. 

That moment had been the crux of one of their worst-ever fights, an adolescent memory from which he recoiled. They’d been arguing about the finger-shaped bruises on Adam’s wrist, which he’d never intended for Gansey to see, and which had been revealed when his sweater sleeve rolled up opening his locker. The debate positions were familiar: Adam, rigid and proud and defensive, saying, _Stop acting like you own me. I’m not Ronan. I’m not Noah._ Gansey, bewildered and hurt, saying, _But I don’t feel any differently toward you. You_ could _be my soulmate. That’s not ownership, it’s-_

Adam had not even allowed Gansey to finish the sentence. _Just because you can’t deal with it doesn’t mean I can’t._ My _soul isn’t fractured. I don’t owe you anything. You don’t get to tell me what to do. Stop acting like_ I’m _the pathetic one here, you spoiled - no, leave me alone - don’t_ touch _me!_

That had been followed by two weeks of simmering silence, which was how long it took before Noah begged both involved parties to stop being so stupid.

“I was an asshole,” Adam said, because this seemed like the safest response. “I’m sorry. See, that’s what I’m saying, I was such a dick all the time-”

“I’m not pointing fingers, Adam. I’m just thinking.”

“About what a dick I was.”

“No, not about your behavior at all.” Gansey pulled back, but not like a rejection. He was just wiping the salt from underneath his glasses. “I was wrong, then. Not about the emotions, of course, but the framing. I loved you exactly the same way I loved them. I still do. That was true. I should have said that. I wish very much that I had not equated love with being fated.”

“I think I brought up the soulmate thing first.”

“But I screwed up. I _love_ you, Adam. That’s all. No cosmic implications necessary. I’m not going anywhere. Not only are you good enough, you are _far_ better than I deserve. I am consistently amazed by how privileged I am to be here. You're _wonderful._ I told you I’m staying for as long as you’ll let me, and I meant it.”

“I think,” Adam said, “that I’m probably gonna let you for a long time.”

Gansey smiled, and his eyes brightened, like Adam had given him a gift. “I’m glad. I’m truly - I’m glad. Only slightly related, I want to make you food. You’re still shaking. Can I make you food?”

“You can make me food.”

Gansey touched Adam’s cheek, gently, then disentangled himself and stood. As he walked to the kitchen, he called over his shoulder, “I do appreciate being reminded that you still like me. Sometimes I get nervous.”

“Of course I still like you,” Adam retorted, throwing a small pillow at Gansey’s retreating back. “You’re making me food.”

-

“Adam?”

Adam jolted awake, surprised to find himself asleep. At least he’d laid in the bed instead of closing his eyes on the rolling chair in the living room; multiple neckaches could be traced back to that one malevolent piece of furniture.

Noah stood in the doorway, backlit by the hall light. The room itself was dark. Night had fallen, properly fallen, stars glimmering outside the window. It had been dusk when Adam first came into the room.

Adam rearranged the pillows and sat up. Groggy and disoriented as he was, his brain was pleased by Noah’s presence. He held out an arm. Noah accepted the invitation, darting across the room and nuzzling under his chin.

Adam sneezed as a spike of gelled hair poked his nose. _“What_ is on your head? No, actually, don’t tell me. I don’t even want to know how many chemicals are in it.”

“So many. I’m the guy they write thinkpieces about. The one individual killing the ozone layer. Sorry for waking you - Gansey said you’ve been asleep for hours.”

 _What?_ Adam fumbled for his phone. The clock confirmed that he had, in fact, been comatose for the majority of the evening. “I don’t know how that happened,” he said. “I had coffee.”

“Caffeine crash?”

It was _perhaps_ possible that there’d be side effects when seven espresso shots wore off at once. “Maybe.”

“Or emotional exhaustion? Just spitballing here.”

Adam narrowed his eyes. As he did, Noah climbed over his legs and settled beside him on the bed. Right in the middle, too, significantly closer than he actually needed to be.

Despite the mild annoyance, Adam didn't mind. “Did Gansey tattle?” he asked.

“Uh, him and Blue. Separately.”

“It’s been a day,” Adam said, because it sure had. “Hey, how’s your trip been?”

“Oh, I got something for you.” Noah dug in the pockets of his ratty jeans. He had to check the sides, the sewn-on front pockets Blue had added, and the fraying back pockets before he unearthed the item. “Here,” he said, pressing something cool and pointy into Adam’s palm.

Adam switched on the bedside lamp and held the object up. It was a tiny piece of amethyst, about the size of his fingertip, the jagged crystals gleaming translucent purple. A tiny smile curved his mouth. He set it beside the smooth stones from Blue, designating a penny-sized patch of unused surface for the display.

“Arkansas has a bunch of caves,” Noah said, “and, like, diamond mines or something? I don’t remember. The tourist traps have these giant sandboxes you can go ‘prospecting’ in. It’s like, pay five dollars, use a glorified pasta strainer, keep whatever minerals you find. Mostly little kids do it, so. Obviously I had to. They don't put anything really valuable in, just little stones. Blue has a bunch of amethyst already. You’re next on the ‘pretty rock’ list.”

“Thanks for the pretty rock,” Adam said. “I’ll treasure it always.”

“Until it gets sucked up by the vacuum,” Noah predicted, like a true optimist.

“That would require someone in this house to vacuum on the regular.”

“Gross. Until it gets eaten alive by a mutant dust bunny. So, hey." Noah slung a leg over Adam's. "How nosy can I be?”

Adam appreciated Noah asking rather than demanding an explanation. “I think I got most of it out of my system already.”

“What’s ‘it?’ Can I be that nosy?”

He seemed more curious than preachy, so Adam said, “I found out the hard way that my limbic system is intact. I was pretty sure I’d evolved past the need for a limbic system, but no. My brain still generates emotional responses to stimuli. Very disappointed by the results of this study.”

“Fucked up if true,” Noah agreed.

Adam stifled a laugh. “I’m getting over it. I just needed a day to be neurotic. Gansey and Blue have already given me all kinds of reassurances, you don’t need to join the pity party.”

“Okay, then I won’t reassure you.” Noah nudged Adam with his elbow. “Instead, can I just say, uh, _duh?”_

Adam did laugh this time, elbowing Noah back. “Hey!”

“But nicely! I’m saying it in the nicest way possible. Duh.”

“I’m trying to be tortured about my identity here.”

“Okay, well, if feeling one entire emotion is enough to shatter your identity, then your identity kinda sucked. Get a better one.”

“Hey,” Adam said again. “Aren't you supposed to be the gentle one? Be gentle with me. I’m fragile.”

“You are _not.”_ Noah drew a knee to his chest and propped his chin on it, his mouth quirking. “Besides, I can be gentle with you and still think you were dumb.”

Fair enough. “I also think I was dumb,” Adam offered. “If I stop poking fun at myself, I’m gonna get embarrassed. Can’t even decide what’s worse, the feelings or the being surprised about the feelings.”

“Definitely the being surprised about the feelings. Next year you’re gonna rediscover you have feelings all over again, and we’re gonna have this exact same conversation. I can see it already. I get to say 'I told you so' when it happens, I call dibs.”

Adam had no rebuttal for this, since it was probably true. “Speaking of people rediscovering feelings,” he said, in the smoothest segue of all time, “how’s Ronan?”

Now that the Ronan-related dread had been contained, Adam could actually think about problem-solving. Reconnaissance through Noah seemed like a step in the right direction. He didn’t expect Noah to spill Ronan’s secrets, but Noah was a pretty good person to bounce ideas off.

“He’s been okay today. Way better than yesterday.”

Adam nodded. “Right. Because of Hennessy.”

“She came over here with me,” Noah said, which was a deeply transparent way to avoid commenting on the situation. “She’s smoking on the balcony now, I think.”

“What’s she want?”

“She wanted to drive Josie.”

“Oh no.”

“It was awesome.”

“Oh _no.”_ Adam pressed his knuckles to his forehead. “I’m not fixing it.”

“Fixing what?”

“Whatever you two broke on the way over here. I wash my hands of it. That poor car. You’re gonna have to go get ripped off by an actual mechanic.”

Noah beamed, unapologetic. Apparently the experience had been worth whatever horrors Hennessy had inflicted upon Josie the beleaguered Mustang. Adam couldn’t imagine willingly handing Hennessy the keys to a Barbie Jeep, let alone an actual vehicle.

“So Ronan’s alone at the motel?” he asked.

What he meant was, _So Ronan’s stable enough to be alone?_

“Watching a wrestling tournament,” Noah said, which meant, _Yeah, bro, I’m not a moron._ “I told him I’d talk to you. But only if you wanna be talked at. Also, I’m supposed to mention he’s a dick.”

“Well, I already knew that.” When Adam realized Noah was still waiting, he said, “Yeah, go ahead. Tell me about Ronan.”

“He’s pretty messed up right now.” Noah frowned in the direction of the door, this seriousness at odds with his earlier mood. “But like I said, _way_ better today. I’m just not sure he’s done being messed up.”

“Does _he_ think he’s done being messed up?”

“I dunno. You’d have to ask him. He didn’t realize how dumb he was being when he did the dumb shit.”

“I already knew that too.”

“It’s mostly just, like - okay. You know how sometimes I’ll walk in on you putting actual literal stitches in your actual literal arm in the actual literal dirty bathroom because you forgot urgent care exists?”

“That happened _one time.”_

“That’s him with the Kavinsky thing.”

This comparison was irritating because it appealed to Adam's empathy. He’d gotten much better over the years, but sometimes he still struggled to identify his own trauma responses when they occurred. The incidents were always characterized by a terrifying lack of control - he couldn't make his mind or body cooperate with him.

“Actually,” Noah added, “you two are a lot alike, sometimes.”

“I think you’re stretching the analogy thin.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Noah said. “It's just, you don't have to do everything yourself all the time. You and him both need to hear it. You don’t have to just shut people out.”

“I resent this,” Adam replied, toeing a line between humorous deflection and actual agitation. “I can’t believe you would frame it like this. I can’t believe you would slap a Ronan label on my existential crisis. I could kick you out, you know. My goodwill only extends so far.”

“All I’m saying here” - Noah spread one arm wide, toward the unoccupied side of the bed - “all I’m saying is you’re not as far apart as you think. So making up shouldn’t be too hard.”

“Noted.”

“At least if you don’t pull away.”

Adam bristled. “I’m not pulling away.”

Noah made a face, like he was just as perturbed by the conversation as Adam himself. “Blue kinda made it sound like there might be some pulling away happening.”

“Blue’s not a mind reader,” Adam snapped. “Look, I am actually gonna be mad if you two have been - been sending _Adam 911_ texts to talk about me behind my back, or whatever.”

Noah sighed. “Just tell me to butt out if you want me to butt out. I'm not gonna fight with you, dude.”

“Sorry.” Adam pulled himself back from the anger, considering whether he wanted to continue. An unfinished conversation would bother him more than pressing onward, so he asked, more calmly, “How am I pulling away?”

“Just - closing yourself off, kinda.” Noah drew a box in the air with his fingertips, as though illustrating a point. “Bracing for the worst. Expecting the worst, I guess. Shutting off. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Don’t shoot the messenger.”

“Hm.” Blue might actually have a point. Adam _had_ approached this conflict as though the resolution would inevitably be more painful than countless others. And it _had_ been making the situation more difficult to face.

“You don’t have to, like, do anything about it. I’m just saying. _If_ it’s a thing, then... it'll just be harder, if you shut down.”

“Yeah.” Adam swung his legs out of the bed. “Thanks. I gotta go talk to Hennessy.”

-

Despite the apparent confidence, Adam wasn’t sure what he intended to talk to Hennessy _about._ All he knew was that her presence complicated his emotions in ways he was just starting to understand. He’d spent _years_ studying her silhouetted mark on Ronan’s shoulder, wishing it could be his own, swallowing loneliness and jealousy and self-loathing like inconvenient bouts of acid reflux. He'd spent years dreading her existence, and then he hadn't known how to react when the conceptual became the literal. Hennessy-the-person was an entirely different entity from Hennessy-the-soulmate. Adam's feelings toward her had taken on a weight of their own.

And part of him wondered whether there might be something to her asinine theory - the theory that non-bonded friendships mimicked soulmate pairings. He’d thought of her as Kavinsky when they’d first met, back when she'd been all glitter and flash and uncaring viciousness.

But now he kind of thought she might be more like him.

This curiosity was scientific, mostly. At the very least, it wasn’t tinged with anger or envy or spite. Adam knew, intellectually, that Ronan wasn’t going to stop loving him just because he loved Hennessy too. He knew that Ronan possessed an infinite capacity for love, that Adam didn't need to compete with anyone. Where the situation was concerned, the most prominent emotion he could identify was embarrassment; he’d pinpointed the reasoning behind several antagonistic impulses, and it boiled down to neurotic insecurity.

There really was nothing worse than looking back and realizing his actions had been driven by irrational idiocy instead of logical calculation.

The smell of smoke immediately enveloped him upon opening the balcony door. An acrid cloud of the stuff drifted around Hennessy. At least it was nearly midnight; most people would be inside. All the same, Adam reflected, the neighbors would start complaining if Hennessy made this a habit.

The porch light illuminated the white chairs and concrete ground with the starkness of an autopsy report. Hennessy turned toward him, lounging in her seat like a monarch, smoke curling from her mouth. “How kind of you to join me, Parrish,” she said. “I’m working on a new aromatherapy line. I call this one _Hell on Fucking Earth._ Thoughts?”

“Might be hard to market. I sense some potential branding problems.”

“I think I can find a niche. Self-destructive bastards. I'll pioneer an industry around hastening your own demise.”

“Sure. I'm pretty sure there are already industries built on that. Might need a narrower premise. You doing okay?”

Her gaze immediately turned wary. “Why?”

“It smells like a wildfire out here. Are you smoking the entire pack?”

“I’m just distractible. Lost track of time. Come join me, if you must.”

Adam did, claiming the chair beside her. The night was still and quiet, the lamplight washing out the city and the stars. Even the sidewalk below was too far for sound to carry easily. The haze enveloped them, a sheer curtain separating them from the world.

“Cigarette?” Hennessy offered.

“Actually, yeah,” Adam said, even though she was clearly being antagonistic.

She arched her eyebrows the same way Blue did when calling someone’s bluff. Adam took the offered cigarette, allowed her to light the end with a very pink and very battered lighter, and inhaled deeply.

Her expression shifted to true surprise when he didn't cough. “Since when are you a smoker?”

“I’m not.” Adam tipped his head back against the chair and closed his eyes. Already the nicotine was relaxing the tightly-wound springs in his brain, steadying his hands, establishing exactly why he wasn't a smoker. It was the kind of quick fix he wouldn’t be able to give up.

“Oh, but you’ve practiced. I can tell. I demand the tragic backstory.”

“It’s really not tragic.”

“I demand the milquetoast backstory.”

“Sure,” Adam said. “My mom let me try one as a kid, to see what it was like. That was her idea of an anti-smoking campaign. It all went as planned, I spat up bile on the lawn, she laughed her ass off. Then I got so mad I taught myself in secret, just to prove I could. So. It kinda backfired. Probably tells you everything you'll ever need to know about me.”

“And you say you’re not a storyteller. That is fucking hilarious. You ought to polish that shit for parties. No, no, make it your _elevator pitch._ Whip it out for the headhunters next time you're job searching, they won't know what hit them. Hell hath no fury like a preteen scorned.” She shoved his arm with her free hand. “I love this anecdote so fucking much, Parrish. If it isn't true, don't tell me. I never want to be disabused of the mental image.”

“It’s true.” Adam took a few more drags, letting quiet settle over them both, exhaling chemicals into the cool night air. “I was done before high school, though. I had to be done. Otherwise I was gonna like it too much.”

“Liking it too much now, are you?”

“Tonight’s a special occasion. I’m stressed out.”

“Right, because you’re ordinarily Mister Light And Breezy. I’ve never once gotten a negative vibe from your laid-back holding-hands-around-the-campfire ass. Why, you're dripping in daisy chains as we speak. World peace must be just around the corner.”

“You can’t tell me you’ve never done a self-challenge,” Adam said. “Practiced some restraint. One cigarette. One pill. One drink. The whole point is setting a limit and then proving you can stick to it.”

“I don’t think I share your masochistic streak.”

“I think I just don’t share your hedonistic streak.”

She laughed, but she didn’t offer a comeback. Quiet crept back in. It felt companionable enough; Hennessy didn't seem to tolerate quiet when she was upset.

Adam finished the cigarette and stubbed it out with his shoe. A second one would strengthen the calm, and the temptation beckoned like an itch. That was why he’d explained the challenge aloud. Even if his own willpower waned, he wasn’t about to lose face in front of Hennessy. Accountability through spite.

He looked at her. She raised her own cigarette to him as if making a toast. “What’s got you so fucking stressed, then?”

“Oh, just generalized inner turmoil, I guess. I promise it’s not interesting. What about you?”

She hadn’t technically admitted to stress. There was no mistaking the tension in her back, though, as she sat up straight and asked, “Why the interrogation?”

“Am I interrogating you? I don’t think I’m doing it right. I need to brush up on my psychological warfare.”

“Fine. Not an interrogation. This is a two-way street. So here’s _my_ question, then,” she said. “The way I see it, there are two possibilities. I want to know whether we’re still allied, or whether you’re about to stab me in the kidney and vanish with my firstborn.”

They’d been getting along fine this morning. Adam didn’t think he’d said anything on the phone to warrant the guarded hostility. “Is accepting a cigarette some kind of secret code now?” he asked. “Did I, like, give the middle finger in some language only you know? I’m literally just sitting here.”

“I thought you’d come out here, if I stayed a little while,” she said, as though this was some sort of transgression. “And here you are, right on schedule. So let’s get it out of the way.”

“I still can't see whatever the hell is happening in your brain,” he said. "And as per usual, I am extremely grateful for that fact. Because I do not want to."

“This is the part where you give me a shovel talk,” she explained, patiently, sweetly, as if to a five-year-old. “Or perhaps more accurately, _another_ shovel talk. The topic of mortality does come up between us strangely often, doesn't it? I’m curious to see where you’ve set your creative aspirations this time.”

It hadn’t even occurred to Adam that this might be about Ronan. _“Should_ I be giving you a shovel talk?”

“Oh, probably. You’ve met me. I hope you know, though, that all of this is all your fault. So you share the blame for any and all future indiscretions.”

“Okay, first of all, I do not. Second of all, what exactly did I do?”

She made a sharp, exasperated gesture. “You’re the one who told me how to work it out, remember? It wasn't long ago, but perhaps I have too much faith in your short-term recall. I took your advice. Couldn’t have weathered the proposal otherwise. So it’s your fault, me and him. You can lie awake haunted about how you made this happen. Marinate in the guilt. Squirm about it.”

“Huh.” Adam hadn’t really expected her to listen to him. He didn't think he was absorbing the information the way she'd intended him to. Certainly he wasn't upset, or jealous. “I thought you two solved it more... instinctively.”

“Wow.”

“That's a fair assumption!”

 _“Wow,”_ she repeated. “What fucking instincts would those be, Parrish? You fucking _live_ with him, I don’t know what you’ve been smoking. And I can’t believe you’d think I have a single nurturing impulse in my icy bitch heart. That’s it. I’m calling sexism. A man would never have to put up with this.”

“For what it's worth," Adam said, "I promise I’d never expect you to be functional with anyone who’s not him."

"Much better."

“I just figured maybe the soulmate thing worked some..." He shrugged. "Magic.”

Hennessy finished her cigarette. She didn’t reach for another, slumping back against her seat after she'd extinguished the embers. “It does work the occasional magic,” she said. “It does not work _miracles._ Besides, you told me yourself that the connection doesn't matter, you hypocritical ass. I distinctly remember. Because you repeated the sentiment about fifteen times in a row.”

“I'm just surprised you used _me_ as your relationship Superglue. I'm not usually the one people come to for stuff like that. But. Glad I could be of service, I guess.”

Hennessy folded her arms behind her head, like she was sunning herself on a beach, the agitation vanishing like it had never been. “Here’s something you’ll find amusing,” she said lightly. “I got downright _mournful_ when you suggested breaking our alliance. All these shifting politics, all our messy priorities. We are but two besieged combatants in a chaotic war zone. I was enjoying our brief Not-Your-Enemy honeymoon.”

Assuming he was reading correctly beneath the meaningless bullshit, her anxiety was a damn near perfect mirror of his own. “We’re still friends, Hennessy.”

“Excellent." She nodded, like they'd settled something. Nothing in her posture changed, but Adam did think something had softened around her eyes. Or maybe he was seeing what he wanted to see. "I’ll inconvenience you posthaste.”

“You should still get some normal friends,” Adam added, because it was true. “When you open the dictionary, our pictures are right next to ‘dysfunction.’ Please tell me you know we haven't been normal."

"Actually, most of my friendships start with antagonism. And the occasional attempted murder."

Adam did not doubt this. It was also not a discussion he was interested in pursuing. "I don’t have a problem with you. At the moment, anyway. I'll tell you when I have problems with you. Because I will. So stop being neurotic.”

One of her hands twitched toward the pack of cigarettes on the armrest of her chair, then stopped. “I simply expected the stakes to change,” she said, “now that he and I have a commitment. He's all kinds of invested in my future, you know. I'm a notoriously ill-advised venture. His retirement account will go belly-up once my stock prices nosedive. Point is, I've been given license to kill. You ought to remind me not to use it.”

Because Adam had spent the entire day drowning in a humiliating deluge of his own self-projection, he was reasonably confident that this was Hennessy’s anxiety talking. “Actually, you had the license to kill already,” he said. "Do I _need_ to remind you not to use it?"

 _"Someone_ around here needs to be a mistrustful bitch."

“I'm still gonna speak my mind if you two decide to be crazy. If you think for one second that I won't call you out, you're wrong. But I don't think the stakes have changed. You're just trying to be responsible now, even if you're probably gonna suck at it. So I'm a hell of a lot less concerned than when you were waving the gun around with the safety off."

Hennessy absorbed this with a frown. Then she turned her gaze toward the sky. Adam gave her room to respond, waiting a long minute, but all she did was sigh and close her eyes.

“He cares a lot about you,” Adam said.

“He cares a lot about _you,”_ Hennessy countered swiftly, coming awake. Apparently she would not stand for this declaration of the obvious. “We are all trapped within the web of Ronan Lynch’s ill-advised attachment. Don’t get fucking weird about it.”

“You have _got_ to stop saying you’re trapped.”

Hennessy flapped a hand, unconcerned. “Fine. We are all voluntarily letting ourselves be silk-wrapped and painlessly devoured within the web of Ronan Lynch’s ill-advised attachment. Don’t get fucking weird about it.”

“I’m serious. I can't tell whether or not you're joking.”

Hennessy opened her eyes to scrutinize him, noted his intensity, and sighed again. “Sorry. Difficult to relinquish my grip on being fucking hilarious. It’s all a joke. Tongue-in-cheek bit regarding apples felled from trees, ouroboroses, et cetera.”

“Generational curses?”

“Those too.” She laughed. “'Cursed' is right. My mum had one mark, so naturally she ate shit and died. My father had several, so naturally he’s living in a suburban McMansion with his bimbo fuckdoll of a replacement. I’m sure this is different, of course. I’m sure Ronan and I different. Said everybody who's ever entered into a red-flag relationship. Got to keep the jokes alive, though, can’t lose sight of that hamfisted slippery slope. How am I to rewrite a tragedy if I'm barred from constant shitting on the story? I'm sorry you don't find it as funny as I do. Sounds like a you problem.”

This was far more personal information than she usually offered - enough for Adam to connect certain dots. No wonder she nursed so many of the same neuroses he did. “That’s funny,” he said. “Neither of my parents had any. Apples felled from trees.”

“And how did that go for them?”

“About as well as things did for yours.”

Hennessy didn’t probe. Adam doubted the particulars interested her, since they weren't entertaining, and he himself wasn’t interested in detailing the saga. “And here we both are,” she said instead, in the same faux-light tone she'd used earlier. “Cycles upon cycles upon cycles. Look at us. It's almost like fate.”

“God, I hope not.”

“No, I suppose you’ve broken your cycle. Or so you think. _That’s_ why you attached yourself to a random passing polycule. I’ve solved the mystery. Best to leech off individuals who are actually capable of love. Best not repeat the sins of your forebears. Your parents only erred in trying to mash two frigid souls together.”

Adam was too familiar with Hennessy’s nonsense to be offended. He wasn't sure she was actually _capable_ of expressing vulnerability if she couldn't insult the other party in the process.

“Nope," he said. "That wasn’t the plan. I did one better. I was gonna opt out of relationships entirely. Avoid inflicting myself on _anyone._ The best plans are the simplest - less margin for error.”

“And then you gave up your convictions,” she said, “for the warmth of another human being. Oh, Parrish. You tragic thing. That is so predictable.”

“Still nope. I ended up meeting someone else without soulmates. She was part of a giant family - one of Blue’s aunts. And she got by just fine. Nothing like my parents.” Jokingly, he added, _“Then_ I attached myself to the random passing polycule. I decided her experiment had had better results than the one my parents did. It’s all been very calculated and scientific and not emotional in the slightest.”

“I knew it,” she said. “I knew you had to be a snake. Thank God. Someone around here speaks my language.”

"So if I can do it," he concluded, "you probably can too. You're just as emotionally constipated."

"Wow. You keep wooing me with lines like that and I'll be forced to seduce you."

Adam laughed, shaking his head. He felt... better, actually. He wasn't sure they'd discussed anything of substance, and she wasn't any less of a pain in the ass than she'd ever been, and he didn't know _why_ he felt better. But-

“I’m really glad you’re here,” he said, surprised, and then puzzled by the surprise.

Hennessy exhaled, just a little too sharp, like she'd been holding her breath. “Well, good,” she replied. “Because you’re stuck with me either way.”

Her phone vibrated, and she glanced down. The device was perched on the armrest closest to Adam, so he could make out the name on the lit-up screen. “How is he?” he asked.

“He's updating me on Wrestle Mania," she said, unlocking the phone. "Probably double-checking that I haven’t died in a vehicle fire. Unless he’s more intrigued by Wrestle Mania than I anticipated. I can't imagine how he got the impression I'd give a shit.” Despite this, she had begun typing out a reply, fingernails clacking against the plastic.

“You should tell him to come home,” Adam said, and then, in response to her quizzical glance, “Tell him I’m ready to talk.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> some announcements!
> 
> 1\. you might have noticed the chapter count has been updated! unless something changes while i edit, there are three chapters left.  
> 2\. you might also have noticed that this work is now part of a series! that's because i plan to continue writing in this verse after this story concludes
> 
> as always, writing adam confronting his own feelings was A Task. thank god though


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ronan and adam finally fucking talk good LORD  
> some resolutions occur

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i think this is the fastest i've ever updated this fic! this update brought to you by I've Been So Impatient To Get Here Finally

The glass door opened. Adam knew, without looking up, that Ronan stood in the entryway. Noah had poked his head out fifteen minutes earlier to inform Adam and Hennessy, cheerfully, that he was dragging Gansey off to "look at travel photos" under the "jaundiced light of an all-night diner." The apartment was deserted.

Adam supposed it was possible that the newcomer was a serial killer. At least until Hennessy dispelled the notion.

“Oh, good, you two can get this show on the road.” She stood and stretched, all lazy catlike unconcern. “I’m fresh out of fucks to give. Used them up earlier, haven’t refilled my health gauge. I will not function as a shield between you, I’ve got commissions to catch up on. Enjoy yourselves. I'm not choosing sides if you fuck it to hell. Toodles.”

She scrubbed her hand over Adam’s hair, making an unholy mess of an already-messy bedhead, and then ducked under Ronan’s arm and vanished into the apartment.

Ronan stepped fully onto the concrete, slid the door shut, and turned toward Adam with his arms spread. “Hey,” he said. “I’m here to grovel.”

Adam's mouth twitched. He sighed, a half-second exhalation, and held out a hand.

Ronan took it, still careful, still hesitant. Unwilling to overstep. Taking nothing for granted. Afraid of a shattered relationship. Afraid of an unshattered one too, probably.

Adam tugged, and Ronan collapsed onto the ground beside his chair like an idiot who hadn't eaten before a blood drive. He sagged sideways, halfway into Adam's lap. His head nestled against Adam's leg, below the armrest, and his breath was an audible rasp.

Adam laid his offered hand against the back of Ronan’s neck, anchoring him there. Ronan's response was to nuzzle into him with near-enough force to shove him from the chair, not unlike a very large puppy trying to make amends.

Adam rested his other hand on Ronan’s shoulder. His chest shook with the tiniest gasp of a laugh. "This is a loving touch," he said, kissing the top of Ronan's head. "It is not a forgiving one. You still gotta grovel."

“I’m so fucking sorry.”

“That’s a start.”

“I’m so, so fucking sorry.” Ronan laid a hand on Adam’s knee by snaking an arm underneath the armrest. The position was not particularly conducive to physical affection, which might have been why he said, “Come down here with me.”

“Making demands already, I see."

“Please.”

Adam had mostly been teasing. Apparently Ronan wasn’t in the mood to joke. “You really are debasing yourself,” Adam observed, just to make it clear that he was kidding, as he shifted off the chair.

It took a lot to get Ronan to utter the P-word. Even more to utter it so earnestly. Adam didn’t really have it in him to be an anxiety-sowing douchebag, so he settled in a less-cramped area by the porch railing and patted the space beside him.

Ronan shuffled over, his jeans scraping against the concrete, until he was close enough to wrap both arms around Adam. One hand pressed into Adam's upper back, the other anchored around his hip, face buried in Adam’s hair. “I’m so fucking sorry,” he said, again, clear enough for Adam to understand. “I’m so sorry.”

“As much as I’m enjoying this,” Adam replied, muffled, into Ronan’s collarbone, “you actually hurt Hennessy worse than me. So I sure hope you did this for her too.”

Ronan laughed, a little raw. “I did.”

“Good.” Adam would have felt too strange to offer forgiveness first, he realized. Hennessy’s ongoing hurt would have needled at him - an unspoken betrayal. “What exactly is the apology for?”

“Being a shitty boyfriend.” Ronan paused, considered. “Being a shitty human being.”

“Yeah, you definitely were both of those things.” Adam should have pulled back, analyzed Ronan's expression, but he was a little too busy feeling snug and home. “That doesn’t really address the personal impact, though.”

“Oh, for the love of God. Did you and Hennessy conspire?”

Adam laughed. “She nitpicked your apology?”

“You have no fucking idea.”

“Good for her,” Adam said, and meant it. “It’s actually way funnier that we didn’t conspire. You’re just stuck with two partners who are like this.”

“On the one hand,” Ronan said, “so fucking worth it. On the other hand, fuck you both so much. We all know I don’t make mouth do word good.”

“Tell me what you’re sorry for.”

Ronan squeezed Adam tighter. His fingertips curled against Adam’s back, pressing in, as though that alone could replace the language. “Tried to drag you down with me,” he said, rough, like it cost him something. “Tried to make you... wanted you to fix the screwup. Fucking coward. Didn’t want to face it.”

Adam sighed softly. “You know how much bigger this mess would’ve been if I’d said okay.”

Ronan’s ribs contracted, hard, like a breath had been punched out of him. “Yeah. Yeah, fuck, I know. I know. Thanks for not doing that. Jesus.”

“You thought I’d say okay, though. At the time, that’s what you thought.”

“Yeah, it actually turns out that, at the time, I was having a complete fucking meltdown,” Ronan snapped. Judging by the rapidity of his breathing, Adam thought he was more anxious than irritated. “So we’re gonna have to take everything I did with a giant grain of fucking salt.”

Adam sighed again. He shifted, sitting sideways in Ronan’s lap, tilting his head back so they were face-to-face. As Ronan’s arms loosened around him, Adam touched the other's jaw. “So. I called it.”

“You called it,” Ronan said. He held Adam’s gaze for all of three seconds before his attention shifted toward the empty deck chairs, apparently unable to retain eye contact. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

“I’m mostly just glad you’re acknowledging it,” Adam said. “‘Cause I was really not loving the whole ‘no, this is how I am’ phase.”

“I’m gonna fix it.” Ronan’s mouth flattened, his jaw tight and his eyes all steely misery. “I’ll - go to fucking grief counseling again, alright, I’ll do the bullshit therapy mantras, I’ll get it the fuck together.”

“I wasn’t gonna ask you to do that.”

“I know. I’m just saying I will. I’m just saying I - _fuck._ I can’t tell you it won’t happen again. Do you fucking get that? I can’t stop it from happening again. I can’t - I’m not dragging you or Hennessy or Gansey down with me. So I gotta fix it. It’s gonna fucking suck, I’ll be a real pill, I’ll get fired by at least five therapists, it’s whatever. I'm gonna fix it.”

All of this sounded reasonable enough to Adam. The unhappiness, though, he could have done without. Ronan’s self-loathing was an animal with guilty, vicious teeth. They sank deep and wouldn't let go.

“Okay.” Adam cupped Ronan’s jaw properly. He didn’t force Ronan to meet his eyes, just rubbed his thumb in little circles against his stubble. “I think that’s a mature decision. I’ll support your quest to drive your therapists crazy. What’s the plan for home support?”

“I’ve got Noah. Gansey. Sargent, too. I’m all good. Whole fucking circle of shoulders to cry on.”

“Sure,” Adam said. “But you know you’re gonna have to set up your go-to network. That’s what, second session stuff? Third, maybe? You’re not really gonna be able to leave therapy at the therapist’s office.”

“So?”

“So, I’m the only one who’s at home right now. Except maybe Hennessy. If I can convince her to stop squatting in the Asbestos Palace.”

“So?”

Irritation crept up Adam’s spine. “So _involve me.”_

“I’m not making it your fucking issue,” Ronan said. “The others are family just as much as you. Why does it fucking matter if they’re not living with me?”

“I am literally telling you to make it my issue.”

“You don’t need that shit on your plate.”

“Wow.” Adam grabbed the railing and pulled himself to his feet, then sat in one of the chairs instead. “Noah was right, we are both impossible. I don’t know how any of you put up with me. I need half a minute or I’m going to shout at you.”

Ronan pressed his knuckles to his forehead, but he didn’t pursue. For a moment, he looked as though he was about to respond, and then he just hunched forward and allowed Adam his thirty seconds.

Once Adam was positive that he wasn’t going to lose his cool, he said, calmly, “I think we’ve crossed some wires. About why I was mad. That’s alright, it’s on me, I wasn’t exactly in a mood to talk things out like rational adults.”

“What the fuck?” Ronan glared up from his place on the ground. Apparently the time for zero-hostility relations had passed. “Literally nothing is on you, you’re not turning this into some self-deprecation session-”

“I’m _not-”_

“-like all the shit I did was your fault, I don’t want to fucking hear it.”

“No, I think we need to talk about this.”

“We _don’t.”_

_“I_ need to talk about this.”

Ronan made a noise that articulately conveyed his displeasure, but he didn’t protest. After a moment, in which he seemed to decide that he couldn’t speak civilly, he made an abortive _Go ahead, then_ gesture.

Adam leaned forward, balancing his elbows on his knees. “You know I’m not pissed about you having a meltdown, right?”

Another abortive gesture. This one Adam interpreted as _What Fucking Ever._

“No, hey. Listen. I’m not mad that you need support. I was pissed about all the other shit you did. I’m not mad at you for having a hard time.”

Ronan grunted, as if this disinterested him.

“No, I-” Several different feelings warred inside Adam, kicked up like a sudden dust cloud. He was pretty sure they were contributing to his current nausea. It was difficult to determine where upset ended and anger began, and he didn’t want either to spill out by accident, so he took a breath.

“I think I must’ve messed up pretty bad,” he said, carefully, “for you to think I don’t want to support you.”

_“What?”_ Ronan stood, half-lurching, gripping the railing like he couldn't remain upright otherwise. “Don’t even fucking start. I’m not dumping it on you when you’ve already dealt with all this other fucking shit. That's it, that's all that's going on, end of story.”

Adam leaned until he could lace his fingers behind his neck. He closed his eyes, his nose nearly touching his knees. “I get that you’re trying to avoid bothering me,” he said, “but I need you to know that you are making this literally as horrible as it could possibly be.”

He wasn’t watching Ronan, but he did hear the slow scrape of concrete as someone relented and sat back down. “Alright,” Ronan said. “Okay. Shit. Okay. I’m done being a dick. I’m listening.”

The damage might have been done; Adam wasn’t sure how to return to equilibrium. He gave himself another thirty seconds to breathe, then sat up straight. “Why did you ask me to cover for you?”

Ronan stared at him. Whatever preparation he’d done, this question apparently hadn't been on the practice exam.

“That’s not a rhetorical question. I want to know.”

“Epic fucking meltdown.”

“No, I'd like to know the thought process is all.” Adam dug his fingers into his knee. “There must’ve been some kind of thought process. Even if it wasn't rational. And I don’t know who the hell you think I am, if you thought I'd ever stand for something like that.”

“That wasn't how I was thinking of it.”

“Then tell me how you were thinking of it.”

Ronan leaned his head against the railing, eyes fixed on the ceiling, as if negotiating with a silent deity. “I didn’t want Hennessy to stop trusting me.”

Right. Because of the everything.

“So you wanted me to fix it. By letting her sister be miserable. And lying to her.”

“Yeah. I was being an asshole.”

“You know that if you’d asked me to help you _talk_ to her, I would’ve said yes. I mean, I'm not great at talking, but.”

Ronan shrugged one shoulder.

“You know I would’ve fixed it if the solution was _actually fixing it.”_

Another shrug.

Adam sat back. Something inside him had gone clear and cold. It was a realization he wanted to unhave, lest he be forced to face his own inadequacies. The truth was, he couldn't compensate for his faults, not in any way that mattered.

“I screwed up,” he said. “Fuck. I’ve _been_ screwing up.”

“You literally have not.”

“No, I'm a saint. I’ve only been an asshole about Hennessy since you first brought her home.” A dull aching thrummed in his temples, a distant drumbeat, an impending war. “As if it’s some big surprise that now you don’t wanna tell me how you’re feeling. God, okay. You don’t have to tell me anything, I earned that, I’m pretty sure. Let’s just be done. You said sorry, I accepted, I miss you. Come sleep in bed again. I’m gonna go lie down.”

“Wait. Wait, fucking-” Ronan lunged forward to grab Adam’s hand before he could open the door. “What are you talking about?”

“I just burnt myself out here. Accidental. I'm making a dignified exit. You don’t want... I’m giving you space. We’re cool, if you want to be.”

“What the hell are you - _Adam.”_

Ronan still had Adam’s hand held hostage, but Adam continued to face the door, if only to shield his face. “You’re not gonna believe me, is all,” he said. “When I tell you I want to do better next time. It’s all just me saying shit I won’t follow through on.”

“What the hell?”

“No, just - God, I have such a headache. I can’t do it if you won’t let me. That’s all. It’s not instinctual. I’m not your soulmate. And I haven’t been working hard enough when it counts, so.” He shrugged. “I swear to God this isn’t self-deprecation. I’m just realizing I’m probably the one who screwed it up. You've got every right not to want me in your business. Seriously, if you let me go, I’ll sleep it off.”

“Adam.”

Adam’s arm felt rigid where it connected to Ronan’s hand. The tether pulled taut, snappable. “I just haven’t been doing it right,” he said. “Loving you. I want to tell you how bad I need you to be okay but I'll just sound like I'm paying lip service. I don’t know how to love you so you’ll see it.”

Ronan’s voice came out strained, barely controlled. “Now we _definitely_ have some fucking wires crossed.”

“Look-”

“Don’t go. Adam, don’t go.”

Adam’s resolve to curl up alone and unhappy in the bed was not strong enough to withstand a plea from Warm Boyfriend. He turned back, and Ronan caught him in his arms, as though Adam would blow away if he didn’t.

Adam felt brittle enough to blow away, actually. And then his throat spasmed, and with it came a tiny little croak of pain, and the brittle shielding wasn’t going to hold him together, so he buried his face in Ronan’s shoulder. "I love you so much," he said.

“Fuck,” Ronan swore, somehow imbuing the word with a fervor a thousand times more profane than his usual. _“Fuck._ You’re out of your _fucking mind.”_

“I don’t think I am.”

“Yes, you are, shit, fuck.” Ronan grasped one of Adam’s hands and brought it to his mouth, lips pressed to his knuckles. “Fuck,” he breathed again, against Adam’s skin.

“Look, I’m just trying to-”

“Trying to support me, yeah, I know, we’ll figure that out. We’ll make a fucking - system. This is the second fucking time I’ve thought about flow charts this week, so, actually kill me, but fuck it. I’ll flip a fucking red card on the fridge if I’m having an episode, whatever, it doesn’t matter, Adam.” Ronan kissed each of Adam’s knuckles, fiercely, the harsh breath from his nostrils tingling over Adam’s skin. “I’ll ask Gansey to Google it, we’ll find some wannabe Dr. Phil on Yahoo Answers, it’s _fine,_ fuck.”

“I’m seriously not trying to make you-”

“No, you’re out of your fucking mind,” Ronan snarled. “You think I don’t _trust_ you, you think _that’s_ what I - are you fucking crazy? Are you the fucking craziest one in this house right now? Here I was thinking I’d taken the trophy but no-”

“This is _so_ not helping-”

“You think I don’t know you fucking love me,” Ronan continued, “like you haven’t been taking care of me and taking care of Hennessy and solving all my fucking problems and being kinder than anyone’s got any right to be, fuck _off,_ you’re out of your fucking mind.”

“I want to _fix-”_

“There’s nothing to fix.” Ronan uncurled Adam’s fingers and peppered tiny kisses over his palm instead. “There’s nothing to fix, you fucking loon, that’s not what this is. I’m so fucking sick of _hurting_ you, of fucking _course_ I don’t want to inflict this shit on you, you think I feel fucking _unloved?_ I’m gonna burn this whole city to the ground. Fuck me. It’s arson time.”

Despite his thin-spun fragility, Adam laughed. _“Loon?”_

“You fucking loon. You deranged bastard, you fucking nutcase.” Ronan punctuated these sentiments by bringing Adam’s other hand to his mouth and kissing that, too, his lips so gentle. “I fucking know you fucking love me.”

It was difficult to compose an argument in the face of such rampant aggression, but Adam summoned his willpower. “I don’t love you how you ought to be loved, though.”

Ronan _growled,_ a sound made all the more impressive for how despairing it was. There was no difference between him and a dog snarling at its reflection. “We have to stop fighting,” he said, although it sounded an awful lot like someone picking a fight. “We have to stop fucking fighting, it’s made you an idiot.”

“Look, I think it’s fine to want to fix deficits in the relationship-”

“- _deficits_ -”

“-so we both know we haven’t just been wasting our time.”

Ronan froze, suddenly, staring at Adam over Adam’s hand, his eyes wide. He might have stopped breathing. “We _both_ know?”

Adam hadn’t meant to bring it up like that. Damn Ronan's ability to read between the lines only when it was inconvenient. “It doesn’t have to be, like, a drastic thing-”

“Parrish.”

“I’m just saying-”

“Parrish.”

“If you keep shutting me down I am gonna start yelling.”

“Adam.” The fury had deserted Ronan completely, dissipating like a wind-blown fog. Adam braced himself, but Ronan didn’t look pale or shaken or ill. He’d - softened around the edges, somehow, his brow furrowed, eyes crinkling, the horror melting into confusion. He kissed Adam’s palm again, and this too was gentle. “I’m listening. Talk to me.”

“Saw Blue earlier. She accidentally made me realize I was having... issues. About you.”

“Issues about me.”

“Insecurities. Worries. Whatever.”

“Okay.”

It was amazing, actually, how quickly Ronan could flip to Concerned Boyfriend when he wasn’t the one in the hotspot. Ronan was nothing if not attentive, a quality Adam could never hope to match.

When Adam didn’t respond, Ronan nodded. “Okay,” he said again. “Insecurities. About what?”

“I don’t know.” There was no way to explain neurotic insecurity in a manner that did not sound neurotic or insecure. “It’s just... easy for you and Hennessy. I don’t understand why, y'know, she has to matter so much when you just met her.”

“Okay, well.” Ronan had dusted off his Rational Voice, which was irritating, since this particular angle only ever made an appearance when Adam was being irrational. “Hennessy isn’t going anywhere. So you’re gonna have to redirect that energy.”

“No, I’m not jealous. I don’t think. Not anymore, at least. I was, for a bit, but it’s - she’s okay. She's literally fine. She's fine. I just don’t understand why I’m - so much harder to love than she is.” There; he’d said it, and his voice hadn’t even cracked. He offset the hurt with a shrug. “But that's not on you. It's just how I am. You don't have to-”

“Adam.” Ronan cut him off, which was fair. He pulled Adam closer, leaning their foreheads together, his voice tender and soft and a perfect narrator for a sleepy podcast. “What in the absolute goddamn _fuck_ are you talking about?”

“I just don’t get to have the same kind of relationship you and she do. It’s fine. I’ve been a huge dick about it this whole time but I’ll get over it. Once I’m used to her I won’t care at all. I barely care now.”

“Okay.” Ronan cupped the back of Adam’s neck. “Okay. I fucked up somewhere.”

“You didn’t-”

“No, see, if you get to say you screwed up then so do I.”

“I’m kind of embarrassed about saying anything.”

“What was it you just said? ‘You are making this literally as horrible as it can possibly be?’”

“Sorry.” Adam closed his eyes. “No, okay, I'm just tired of doing this with people. It's so pointless. I get that I’m loved. Gansey and I just went through a whole thing about it. I get that I’ve got you guys, I get that you’re in it with me. I get that you're my family. I just don’t get to have - what you and Hennessy have. It’s fine. I don’t wanna whine about it. It would be like - like whining about growing up poor. Or having shitty parents.”

“I hate to break it to you, Parrish,” Ronan said, “but literally everyone who is not you whines about that shit.”

It didn’t matter that _other people_ whined about it. What mattered was that the whining was futile. Inconsequential. Inherently meaningless. It was a way of devoting energy to a problem that would never be solved. A waste of time, resources, brainpower-

“What, is this what it’s always like for you?” Ronan asked, and he crested an edge of anger, here, except that his eyes still reflected the same distress. “That you’re missing out on - that you’re fucking _deprived-”_

“Look, I know it doesn’t make sense to you,” Adam interrupted. “But I thought you already knew.”

“I knew you have occasional neurotic impulses, sure, everyone’s got neurotic impulses. _Fuck._ All the _time?”_

“Hey, no, no, it’s not like I’ve been silently tortured every second of every day for the past decade. I have better things to do. There’s nuance.”

“Fuck,” Ronan said again, as if this changed nothing. “Fuck. Tell me what to do.”

Adam blinked. “I’m okay-”

“No,” Ronan said, and took hold of Adam’s upper arms, pushing him back against the door. “No, tell me how to show you. Tell me what to do. Anything you need, fuck, just tell me.”

This seemed like a big ask, especially considering Adam had no idea what he needed in the first place. He didn't know whether he needed anything at all, except shit he couldn't have. “I don’t-”

“No, okay, that’s too much. That’s too much, fuck, okay. Okay.” The energy crackling below Ronan’s skin had taken many shapes over the past few minutes. Now it was a palpable nervousness, the coiled tension of someone reaching out and half-expecting to be bitten. He stepped back, releasing Adam, scrubbing a hand over his face. “Tell me something I can do. One thing. One thing to love you.”

Adam wasn’t sure he felt _unloved._ The shame mixed with guilt, a leaden weight, a pathetic cry for attention. What the hell had he been thinking, starting a conversation with _I don’t think you love me enough_ -

“Parrish,” Ronan said, and tipped Adam’s chin up with his thumb. “You’re drifting. Stick with me.”

“It’s pretty obvious you love me,” Adam replied, “considering how badly you’re freaking out.”

Ronan closed his eyes and took an audible breath. His exhale was long, timed. Some of the thrumming energy dissipated, his body stilling. “No, it’s like you said,” he murmured, “it doesn’t come naturally. It’s not - instinctive. _Fuck._ I didn’t know I wasn’t giving you - Adam, look at me, I didn’t _know.”_

“For what it’s worth, I didn’t actually know, either. This whole revelation is kinda new to me. It's so blatantly against all my principles that I'm about ready to kick my own ass.”

“So you’ve at least gotta believe,” Ronan said, earnest, “that I want it as much as you do. You’ve gotta believe that. If I’m fucking up, it’s the same way you think you’re fucking up, it’s all just - we’re _missing_ each other.”

Adam swallowed, but that didn’t erase the rasp. “I believe you.”

“‘Cause I don’t love any of them any more than I love you and if you don’t fucking know that-” Ronan’s tone edged toward the plaintive, now, somewhere between frustration and upset. “It’s not about the fucking feelings, it’s not about what I’m fucking feeling. You’re just not fucking seeing it. I need to _show_ you.”

“Let’s go inside,” Adam said.

-

It was good that everyone had vacated the apartment, because neither Adam nor Ronan managed to be particularly polite about their journey to the bedroom. Ronan’s tank top ended up flung over the back of the rolling chair, Adam nearly broke his neck stumbling over the couch mattress, and by the time the bedroom door shut, all but the last three buttons on his shirt were undone.

Ronan pressed Adam back against the door, and Adam reached down to flip the lock.

Kissing Ronan had never gotten boring, even after all this time. There was something about the way both of them _wanted,_ reaching for the other as though they were the only source of oxygen three hundred feet in the deep. Adam’s mouth burned where he kissed Ronan, his fingers fumbling and hasty, nails dragging over Ronan’s back like he could wrap himself inside the other’s skin.

Ronan wasn’t responding to the urgency. He let Adam’s hands roam where they wanted - his chest, his shoulders, the back of his neck, his ribs - but he undid the few remaining buttons on Adam’s shirt with painstaking precision, thumbs stroking Adam’s stomach just to feel his muscles tense, and Adam almost lost his mind.

But he recognized this type of movement, this intentional dance. So even though he wanted to rock his head back and unfocus until the world dissolved, he whispered, “It won’t be enough.”

“What won’t?”

“We’ve done this before. It’ll be good - it won’t be enough.”

Maybe nothing would be enough. Maybe Adam was too caught up in the provable, the scientific, the tactile. Maybe there was no fixing whatever had broken in him. Maybe he'd been an idiot to give voice to it in the first place.

Adam felt Ronan’s measured breaths because Ronan’s ribs were pressed against his own. Then Ronan stepped back, separating them entirely, at least two yawning feet of space between them.

That had not been Adam’s intention. He had to fight the urge to follow, to resume the tryst as though the separation was a challenge. Which probably meant they needed the breather.

Physical touch was just _easier._ Easier for Ronan, who communicated everything through body language; easier for Adam, who could barely identify emotions but _could_ identify _yes good do that again-_

“I need you to tell me,” Adam said. That was the problem, wasn’t it? This gnawing terror that Ronan felt something so enormous and so incompatible and so different from what he himself did? “I need you to tell me how you feel about me.”

Agitation curled Ronan’s hands into half-fists. “I’m not _Gansey,_ man-”

“Neither am I.” Forming coherent thoughts had been easier ten minutes ago. Adam made a valiant effort despite his distracted brain. “I need you to try. Doesn’t have to be poetic. Doesn’t have to come out right. I need-”

He broke off, and the uncertainty cleared from Ronan’s expression. “Okay,” Ronan said, because he’d promised anything, and apparently he’d meant it. “Fuck. Okay.”

“It’ll be better if you’re touching me,” Adam added. The idea of making Ronan stand in the middle of a room awkwardly reciting his feelings seemed more like a punishment than a romantic endeavor. “I know that’s what - it’s how you - mmmph.”

He hadn’t even finished speaking before Ronan’s mouth found his, the weight of his body pressed to Adam like he’d never gone. An undercurrent of relief threaded through the motions, now, Ronan’s tense muscles loosening wherever Adam’s hands touched. His skin was so warm. Adam trailed his nails down Ronan’s spine and grinned at the answering gasp, bumping along each vertebrae, only now allowing himself the chance to slow down and savor.

Ronan separated their mouths to kiss down Adam’s jaw, nibbling here and there along the way. “Fuck,” he mumbled, the sound vibrating through Adam’s skin, “I’m thinking. I’m thinking. I don’t know where to fucking start.”

Now Adam tipped his head back, his eyes half-closing, focus slipping. “Talk to me how you talk to Hennessy.”

Ronan paused, but only for a second. “Kind of weird, Parrish,” he said, kissing behind Adam’s ear, “but all right. Let’s see. You’re neurotic as hell, you’re a dumbass shithead, you’re-”

Adam dug his fingernails into Ronan’s back. “Not like that, asshole. Like you’re just meeting me.” He gasped as Ronan’s teeth nibbled the shell of his ear, the thought threatening to float away. “Like I - like I don’t know any of it yet, like - you’re starting from scratch.”

Because he _knew_ that Ronan had spoken to her. He knew that Ronan had only spoken to her because Hennessy wasn't familiar enough to intuit his feelings. He knew that the pair of them must have managed enough sincerity to negotiate their partnership, shitty deflection be damned. After a decade of learning Ronan’s usual mannerisms, Adam had to admit that he was curious about this one.

“Fuck.” Ronan spent a good half-minute familiarizing his mouth with the side of Adam’s neck, which Adam appreciated, even though it wasn’t actually furthering the agenda. “Okay, fuck, here. Come here.”

He tugged Adam in the direction of the bed. Adam placed his hands on Ronan’s shoulders and pushed him down. It was his turn to kiss across Ronan’s neck and ear and jaw; making out in bed involved fewer logistics than making out against the wall, so the change in position made sense.

Adam placed his mouth over Ronan’s pulse point. His heartbeat was a trapped bird’s flutter. Resisting the urge to bite, Adam grazed the skin with his teeth, and one of Ronan’s arms snagged hard around him.

The journey up to the pillows was slow going. Once they’d successfully migrated to the other end of the mattress, Ronan said, “Shifting.” This was the half-second warning Adam got before being unceremoniously flipped onto his back.

It was hard to be too disgruntled, not with pillows below and Ronan’s weight like a blanket above. If anything, he felt calm. Calmer. Calm enough to realize how keyed-up he’d been, like his hands alone would be enough to drag out a confession.

Ronan threaded the fingers of one hand through Adam’s, pressing it down against the quilt. He didn’t have the mischievous air that came from an impromptu wrestling match. There was something different about his eyes, a focused and determined intensity, a narrow watchfulness. Better than the consternation or horror of before. “Okay?” he asked.

It was at this point that Adam realized Ronan had devised some sort of plan. Planning ahead wasn’t Ronan’s favorite pastime, especially where kissing was concerned, but perhaps the extra challenge had forced his hand.

“Yeah,” Adam said. “It’s okay. It’s good.”

Ronan leaned down to press his mouth against Adam’s hearing ear. “I want to make sure you can hear me,” he murmured, and every nerve ending in Adam’s spine lit up. His toes curled. “This okay, or does it tickle?”

“This is driving me crazy, actually,” Adam said.

“Good crazy?”

Adam started to reply with a _Practically manic,_ discovered his throat was too dry, and said, “Yeah. Mm. Yep.”

Ronan smiled, a motion Adam felt rather than saw. He squeezed Adam’s fingers and propped himself up with his other arm. His chest, where it pressed against Adam’s, had synced to Adam’s breathing - or, more likely, Adam’s breathing had synced to Ronan’s.

“You are the best fucking decision I’ve ever made,” Ronan mumbled. “You are a fucking gift from God.”

Adam’s eyes closed. Sentiments of this kind were nearly always sarcastic when they came from Ronan's mouth. But this was also exactly what Ronan had told him in the park days before: _You don’t know how much time I’ve spent thanking fucking God for you-_

“You’re fucking incredible, look at you, bravest person I know. Strongest person I know. Smartest person I know. Fuck, I don’t know what qualities to list here, man, you’ve got all of them, listen. Fuck.”

This was a stumble, as Ronan ran out of adjectives, but that was okay. At least he hadn’t started populating the list with untrue virtues.

“I don’t know how to fucking describe you as a person,” Ronan said. “I’m still not Gansey.”

Despite his obvious annoyance - either at Adam’s request or at himself - he had not actually removed his mouth from Adam’s ear, which meant new goosebumps prickled along Adam’s shoulders.

“Okay,” Adam said. “I believe you anyway. You’d never go to all this trouble for a lie.”

“Shut up, I’m not finished yet. I’m recentering. You know when the GPS says you’re in the middle of a fucking lake and you have to hit the button to see the road?”

“I love how you have this extremely specific metaphor as soon as I’m not the subject of the sentence.”

“I _can’t,”_ Ronan said. “It’s too big. The feeling. I don’t know how you expect me to just make words out of the fucking sun, it’s too big.”

“You’re seriously comparing me to the _sun?_ You’re seriously going the ninth-grade English route?”

_“You_ asked for this, dickhead. Give me a second. I’m making it smaller.”

“You don’t actually have to-”

_“Shut.”_

Ronan pressed his forehead to the pillow. He spent about a minute like that, in poised and contemplative silence, unmoving except for his rhythmic breaths. Then he returned his attention to Adam’s ear.

“I love your fucking smile. I love seeing you smile at stupid mugs in the cupboard, or light up over finding some out-of-print paperback you read eight years ago - your _laugh,_ I love your fucking laugh, I love it when you’re laughing so hard you aren’t fucking thinking about anything else-”

He took a breath and continued, apparently having hit upon his niche. “I love that you put sticky notes all over the goddamn apartment but never get rid of them so you’d have to do a fucking paleontological dig to find the bottom. I love that you watch the sunrise. I love that you squeeze your toothpaste from the bottom-up and have a superiority complex about it-”

“‘Cause then I don’t have to roll the whole tube up like an animal-”

“I love,” Ronan said, “that you tell me when I fuck up. I love that we still love each other even when you’re being stupid, and on that note, you’re always the stupid one, I win every argument we’ve ever had, the end-”

_“Excuse_ me-”

Ronan’s whole body rippled atop Adam’s as he laughed. “Just seeing if you’re still listening.”

“I’m listening.” Adam couldn’t fathom a universe in which he stopped listening now.

“I love how much you fucking care,” Ronan said, and then, as Adam squirmed underneath him, “Quit it. I love all the maudlin fucking feelings that you’re pretending don’t exist. I love watching you with Gansey and Noah and Blue and Hennessy, I love that you care about them, I love that you got to choose and you chose _them_ when you could’ve had anyone-”

“I chose you too,” Adam breathed, although it was more shitty than earnest. “That was pretty definitively a thing that happened.”

“Yeah, whatever, you get some points off for poor judgment, shut up, look. I would’ve chosen those assholes, too, if I got to pick, so your taste is obviously fucking impeccable-”

“You’re losing the plot here.”

“Oh, I see, you force me to talk and now I’m talking too much, boo fucking hoo. Fuck off, I fucking love watching you with them, I love that you make them happy, I love seeing them make you happy, I love that you’re part of the family and that it’s because you decided to be part of the family and then just did it. I love that that’s how you do fucking everything, full speed ahead, no fucking hesitation. You’re fucking - _essential,_ asshole, are you fucking _stupid,_ how did you not know this.”

“Aaand he’s back.” A good thing, too, considering Adam was both breathless and fighting back a sudden stinging bout of tears.

“I want to wake up every morning and choose you all over again and keep choosing you and get to have that, get to _deserve_ that. If I’m not making you happy then I’m not getting this right. Let me get this right.”

Despite his best efforts, Adam’s reply emerged a whisper. “You’re getting it right.”

“I don’t want you to be my fucking soulmate,” Ronan said - almost snarled. “I don’t want you to be anything except what you fucking are right now. I want us to be exactly what we fucking are and nothing else. It’s _good,_ Parrish, it’s fucking good, what we have is good, it’s not bad just because it’s hard. We fucking built it. We made it from scratch. Shit’s organic. Ethically sourced. Low environmental impact-”

“You’re losing the plot again,” Adam replied, but his voice cracked.

Ronan pushed himself up to scan Adam’s face, shifting his weight so that he could lay a hand against Adam’s now-wet cheek. “I’m so fucking mad that I have to tell you our relationship is good,” he said, very gently, zero trace of any actual anger. “You should already know that, dipshit.”

“I do know that. I do.”

“I’m not fucking going anywhere.”

“It’s just, sometimes,” Adam said, reasonably, “I start thinking maybe it’s all too good to be true.”

“Okay, well, here’s a real fun fucking fact,” Ronan replied, acidic. “I panic every three months about _Gansey_ being too good for _me_ to be true. Turns out soulmates don’t actually mean security. On account of how bad they can fucking suck. So piss off about my grass being greener. I know this is gonna rock your entire world, but you didn’t singlehandedly fucking invent the ‘I don't want to lose people’ emotion.”

Adam swiped his free hand over his eyes. “Huh.”

“Huh?”

“That’s actually a pretty good point.”

“You fucking think?”

“Huh.” He fumbled for an edge of the quilt to wipe his nose on. “I just realized something. I might have human emotions.”

“I love you so fucking much,” Ronan said, shaking his head, “and you are so fucking stupid. God help me.”

He brushed Adam’s cheek again, then stroked a curl of hair back from his forehead. The heat that had driven them here had mostly dissipated; Ronan rolled onto his side, slinging a leg over Adam’s thigh.

“Hey, don’t be rude,” Adam replied. “I’m having an epiphany here.”

“You and fucking Hennessy, I swear to God.” Ronan groaned in the most drawn-out, melodramatic manner possible, his fingers still smoothing through Adam’s hair. “How the fuck am _I_ the most emotionally intelligent person here? Have you seen _literally anything_ I did this past week?”

“I think it might be karma,” Adam said. “For, uh, the entirety of high school.”

“Wow.” Ronan didn’t seem interested in a rebuttal. He just touched Adam’s cheek one more time, reverent, soft. “Do you fucking get it now? I don't know what else I can say.”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“Good. You’re an idiot.” He kissed Adam’s mouth. “We’re okay?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t know. I should’ve known. I would’ve told you sooner.”

“It’s okay.” Adam covered Ronan’s hand with his, leaning into the touch. “We’re making up the playbook as we go. Always have been. Bound to be some messes here and there. I love you. Stay.”

The corner of Ronan’s mouth quirked, and he stretched, flipping over the pillows. “Always, asshole.”


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> various soulmates meet various siblings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> penultimate chapter!  
> the one after this will be the final resolution.

Adam fell asleep long before Ronan did. As the night wore into early morning, Ronan studied him, tracing his fingertips along the curve of Adam’s shoulders. The tension had left his back, the blankets tangled around his waist, his jaw relaxed, eyelids flickering through dreams.

Ronan was never going to stop thanking God for this. There was something about watching Adam’s rest that calmed him, stilled the eternal maelstrom in his chest. He kissed a constellation of freckles on Adam’s upper arm, and Adam made a sleepy sound.

“Just me,” he said, tugging the covers up to Adam’s neck, burying him inside a mound of comfort.

Adam hummed equally sleepy acknowledgement and tucked his chin against the quilt.

From beyond the bedroom, there came the sound of the apartment door opening. The arrival could have been Hennessy or Gansey or Noah. Ronan lifted the blankets and eased himself to his feet, stealthily padding out to the hallway to avoid disturbing Adam.

When he arrived, Noah and Gansey both occupied the living room - Gansey curled in the corner of the pull-out mattress like he’d just sat down, Noah perched on the edge watching him.

Ronan was suddenly unsure whether he’d be welcome. His moment of hesitation lasted long enough for Gansey to glance up.

“Oh,” Gansey said, surprised but not - Ronan hoped - displeased. “You made up with Adam?”

“Yeah.”

“Actually made up?” Noah asked. “Or just boned?”

Ronan crossed to the mattress, since that housed the closest pillow. It made an excellent projectile to hurl at Noah’s head.

Noah ducked. “I’m asking with love!”

“Actually made up, dickface,” Ronan said.

“Oh, good. That motel room is gross as hell. It’s like you looked for the worst place in town on purpose.”

“That is basically what I did, yeah.”

Ronan suspected that Gansey’s tension still ran high. He wasn’t sure what to say to fix things. All of this talking with Hennessy and Adam should theoretically have primed him for a conversation, but in reality, he just felt like a wrung-out dish towel.

He climbed onto the mattress instead, clambering over to flop against Gansey’s chest. This was a strategic move that effectively pinned Gansey against the arm of the sofa, helpless to the brunt of Ronan’s apologetic affection.

Instead of sighing with annoyance, Gansey wrapped his arms around Ronan and hugged him close.

Oh. So maybe the tensions weren’t so high.

“Noah and I spent quite some time talking tonight,” Gansey said, as though answering an unspoken question. “How are you feeling?”

Ronan considered. How the fuck _was_ he feeling? Relieved beyond measure to have fixed things with both Adam and Hennessy. Anxious about all the work he still had to do. Terrified by his own mind, as if his inability to control himself was anything new.

“I don’t want to die,” he said.

“Well.” Noah scooted over to press himself to Ronan’s side, sandwiching him against Gansey. “Kinda bare minimum stuff, dude, but. Good?”

“No, it’s... I don’t want to die. I’m telling you guys I don’t want to die. It’s a newsflash. A press release. I’m not killing myself. That’s not the kind of fucking crazy I am right now.”

“Okay,” Gansey said. “I’m glad to hear that.”

“I’m not-” Ronan broke off. _I’m not where I was._ If he started thinking too hard about where he’d been in the months preceding and then following Kavinsky’s death, he’d get dizzy. Focus would become impossible. “Look, just - fuck. Is there ever gonna be a time when I’m not dying in either of your heads?”

There probably was not. That was the price of having courted death once before. Ronan didn’t know how he’d ever convince Gansey or Noah that the spectre wasn’t whistling at his doorstep. Nearly a decade before, Noah had ridden with a dying Ronan in an ambulance, a trip Ronan didn’t remember and Noah still had nightmares about. Gansey had missed four days of classes to sit by Ronan’s bed or wring his hands in the hospital lobby.

Ronan was never gonna come back from that. He’d told Hennessy about being in her shoes, but he wasn’t sure that she knew exactly how much headache he’d caused.

“You’re not dying in my head,” Noah said. “Mostly you’re just really drunk and belligerent.”

Ronan looked around for the pillow, discovered it was out of arm’s reach, and scuffed Noah’s hair instead.

“Hey!” Noah protested.

Gansey hummed, ignoring this. “I didn’t treat you fairly,” he murmured, contemplative. “I had no reason to believe you were hurt, not this time. I just - sometimes I-”

“I’m not the only crazy person here, yeah, I get it.” Ronan gathered up a fistful of Gansey’s shirt. “I don’t want to die. I’m not gonna die.”

“I know.”

“I’m not gonna stop being sick, either.”

Gansey exhaled slowly. Ronan couldn’t see his face from this angle, but he could feel the tightening of his embrace. “Then we deal with that. We can deal with that.”

“I need-” Ronan broke off again, unable to shape the sentence. “You need to fucking trust me. You need to trust me when I say I won’t hurt myself.”

“We can do that,” Noah said, propping his chin on Ronan’s shoulder. “I believe you. Zero concern here. I’m the North Pole of chill.”

“I am so fucked up.” Ronan half-laughed, a motion that hurt his head. “It needs to be fine that I’m fucked up. Just for a little while. I just need to be fucked up for a little while.”

Gansey touched the back of Ronan’s neck. “Of course,” he said, as though this request had been phrased comprehensibly.

“I think,” Noah mused, “you might be overestimating how normal we thought you were in the first place.”

Ronan elbowed him in the ribs.

“I’m just saying!” Noah said, wounded. _“You’re_ the one surprised about being fucked up. We’ve all been here for whenever you’re ready. We’ll be here. Whatever you need.”

Ronan released Gansey’s shirt in favor of looping his arms around Gansey, doing his best to burrow into Gansey’s chest, like he could bury himself deep enough to shut away the world. “Don’t let me be alone,” he said. “Just don’t let me be alone.”

-

Hennessy met Ronan’s older brother on an unassuming Sunday morning about four weeks into their partnership. She was dozing on the apartment couch with the last dregs of a Ritalin preventing REM sleep, more content than she had any right to be, when there was a sharp knock on the door.

The noise startled her into a sitting position. Ronan was still asleep. When a second knock came, she crept up to the peephole. 

As Ronan staggered from the bedroom clad in pajama pants and one of Adam’s hoodies, Hennessy turned to him and said, “It’s the IRS.”

“Great.”

“I assume they’re here to take you away,” she said, “since I am a law-abiding citizen who has never committed even one single tax fraud. Or any fraud. Of any kind.”

“Yeah, keep rehearsing that for the jury.” Ronan nudged her aside and opened the door, apparently unconcerned by the presence of government bureaucrats. “You know the key’s for emergencies, right?”

“It is _not,”_ she began, before she realized that he was talking to the IRS agent.

“You were supposed to be in the lobby forty minutes ago,” the guy said.

“The fuck, I was not.” Ronan drew his phone from the pocket of his pajama pants and squinted at the screen. “Oh, the fuck, I was. I gotta shower. Where’s Matthew?”

“Befriending a colony of pigeons on the sidewalk. Planning to smuggle one back to his dorm, I’m sure. Dragging us further and further down a dark timeline in which the sun sets on a pile of bird shit inside my car. You haven’t _showered_ yet?”

“Time’s a social construct. Either come inside or go downstairs, you look like a sad fucking cat standing there.”

This conversation contained enough context clues for Hennessy to place the guy’s identity. Not an IRS agent, then. She could see the family resemblance, now that she knew - the same blue eyes, the same sharp cheekbones, the same haughty set to the jaw. Declan stepped inside, and she noted that he shared Ronan’s height and physique, too.

It was just that everything about him was so _forgettable._ Curly brown hair, straight white teeth, an unfashionable gray suit that had clearly been tailored. All the markers of a person with money and zero personality. If she painted him, she wouldn’t even waste time on the details. He’d become a smudged blur in the background, set dressing for a more interesting subject.

Ronan hadn’t told her much about Declan - certainly less than she’d told him about Jordan. Judging by the dude’s looks, that was because there wasn’t much to tell.

Declan’s gaze landed on Hennessy, and his mouth tightened with surprise. Then his expression smoothed. As if on reflex, he held out a hand. “Declan,” he said, probably assuming she didn’t know. “Declan Lynch.”

He wore a pair of fine leather gloves that were far nicer than the suit. They were thin and supple, conforming to the flex of his fingers, much prettier than anything else about him.

Hennessy gripped his hand. Rather than shaking it like a normal fucking person, she lifted it so that she could study the glove more closely. Genuine leather rather than synthetic, she thought. A design meant to last for decades.

“Hennessy,” she replied, like this was a normal custom. “Just Hennessy.”

Declan freed his hand with a minimum of visible irritation. “Pardon the intrusion. Ronan was supposed to meet us for breakfast.”

“God,” Hennessy said, putting a hand over her heart. “Did you have _reservations?”_

“I’m not allowed in any restaurants that take reservations,” Ronan replied, an assertion that could either be hyperbole or literal fact. “Relax, old man. IHOP will still be there in twenty minutes.”

Declan closed the door and appraised Hennessy again. She smiled at him. It was clear that he had no fucking idea what she was doing in his brother’s apartment, a puzzle made more baffling by the inexplicable domesticity. She’d picked a fantastic day to wrap a scarf around her conditioned hair, shrug on one of Adam’s button-up shirts, pull fuzzy socks over her cold toes, and forgo pants altogether.

“So, Hennessy,” Declan said.

He waited for a moment, probably to see whether she’d help him out. She watched him search for a tactful query with undisguised glee.

“Are you a... neighbor?”

Hennessy wasn’t sure what the pause withheld. _Are you a random floozy sleeping with some member of my brother’s harem,_ probably.

“Oh, right,” Ronan said, as if just now remembering. “Did I ever tell you I met my last soulmate?”

The ensuing pause was noticeable, but shorter than most shocked silences. Hennessy could at least appreciate the quickness with which Declan reacted. “Of course you didn’t,” he replied, far more annoyed than wounded. “Why tell me anything, ever? Good to meet you, Hennessy. How long have you two known each other?”

“Five years,” she said.

Declan just sighed.

“Couple weeks,” Ronan corrected. “Hey, here’s a great idea. You two get to know each other while I scrub off.”

The gleam in his eye told Hennessy everything she needed to know. Mainly, _Yes, you and I_ are _united in our desire to torment this poor bastard who had the misfortune of wandering into our hellscape. Please continue making Declan the butt of a cosmic joke. I’m having a great time._

She couldn’t imagine Ronan expecting her to play nice. If he wanted her to act normal, he’d need to give her more advance warning.

As Ronan disappeared into the bathroom, Declan took an uncomfortable seat on the rolling chair. His back was so straight that he looked like one of those startled rabbits in a nature documentary, ears pricked, eyes wide.

“I’m not going to eat you,” Hennessy said. “You’re not worth the indigestion.”

“Do you want to...” Declan nodded at her bare legs, and then lifted his gaze to Anywhere Except Her Bare Legs.

“No,” Hennessy said. “It’s hot in here.” 

It was not.

Declan relaxed his shoulders, but in such a way that she knew he’d altered the posture consciously. “Did you two enjoy yourselves last night, then?” 

Hennessy paused. It was possible that Declan was unaware of his brother’s latent identity as a raging homosexual. That felt like the kind of detail Ronan would have mentioned, though, before leaving Hennessy to her own devices.

Then again, Ronan was notoriously terrible about telling anyone anything important, ever.

It seemed prudent to clarify the situation. “Are you asking me if I fucked your brother?” she asked, sweetly.

Declan didn’t blink. “Only if you enjoyed yourselves.”

“Not carnally, I’m afraid.”

“But enough for him to oversleep.”

Neither she nor Ronan had done anything of particular note the night before. His oversleeping _was_ probably her fault, but only because she’d turned his alarm off. Because he used the most annoying ringtone imaginable. How was she supposed to know that he was getting up for an actual reason?

Anyway, she was unimpressed by Declan’s inability to mind his own fucking business. “We both injected five whole heroins. Slept like the dead. It’s romantic to do opioids with a partner. Get off his back.”

_Now_ Declan blinked. “I apologize,” he said. “I didn’t mean to come across as judgmental.”

“Well, you did. You’ve been assigned the title of Judgy Bitch. What do you do for work, exactly?”

“Oh-” He blinked again, maybe thrown by the transition. “I’m a financial examiner. I evaluate loan risks and review corporate balance sheets for tax discrepancies.”

“That sounds absolutely fucking terrible,” she said. “Studying spreadsheets in a stuffy office all day? I can’t imagine how you haven’t eaten a gun. Look at you. You’re practically a different species. How _did_ you and Ronan emerge from the same womb?”

“Easy. We didn’t.” Before she could formulate a scathing response to _that_ revelation, he said, “What do _you_ do?”

“Oh, I’m an art forger paid exclusively in cash.” She smiled. “My tax paperwork seems very legit, though.”

“It’s not really about the legitimacy of the paperwork,” Declan said. “It’s more about not attracting the government’s attention in the first place.”

Hennessy tilted her head. He was messing with her, obviously, but she liked the idea that he might be interesting. “You aren’t the brother who was drugged,” she said. “Can’t be. You seem resourceful.”

Declan didn’t react to this. Since he’d been reacting normally to everything else, Hennessy took special note of the stillness. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Joseph Kavinsky?”

This did get a reaction. His eyes flashed, as though she’d hurled an unexpected slur in his direction.

“Actually,” he said, “I’m not interested in this game. I’ll be in the lobby when Ronan’s ready.”

And he got up and left the apartment. Hennessy did give him one point of grudging respect for this; she would have guessed that he’d be more easily trapped by social convention.

Ronan emerged from the bathroom ten minutes later, freshly clothed in the same jeans-and-tank getup he always wore. He didn’t seem surprised by Hennessy’s solitude. “How long did he last?”

“About four minutes, I think.”

“Sweet. Now he won’t get on my fucking case about not telling him.”

Hennessy pouted. “I feel distinctly used.”

“That’s because I used you. As if you weren’t dying to screw with him.” He grabbed his coat from the peg by the door. Then he turned to her, hesitating. “Do you... want to come with?”

“I would rather be eaten alive by fire ants,” she said pleasantly.

He snorted, saluted her, and exited.

-

It was a few weeks after the Declan Incident that Ronan woke to Hennessy climbing into the bed.

This wasn’t an unusual occurrence. When Hennessy decided that she was lonely at three in the morning, she had a habit of entering the apartment and leeching off the warmth of the bodies inside. Adam had gotten accustomed to it long before Ronan had, accepting her presence with little more than a tired grumble - much the same way he’d accepted Ronan’s presence years before.

What was unusual this time was that she was still wearing her shoes and a scratchy lace monstrosity of a top. As Ronan squinted blearily up at her, she jabbed an elbow into his chest. “Up.”

Adam, safely marooned on his own side of the bed, pulled the pillow over his head.

“Not you,” Hennessy added. “Lynch, up.”

Ronan got up.

If she asked, he’d say that it was for Adam’s sake. But truthfully, the change in routine made him wary. A lonely Hennessy would wiggle her way into the middle of the mattress, demanding attention without a second thought. A petty Hennessy wouldn’t be here at all. She didn’t often drag Ronan out of bed, which meant that something must have happened.

Since the air outside was cold, Ronan sat on the living room couch and flicked on the lamp. Hennessy plopped beside him without hesitation. She nudged underneath his arm like a cat, and he hugged her against his side.

She was trembling.

It was possible that she’d just taken a shitload of stimulants. Still, Ronan grabbed the blanket from the back of the couch and unfolded it around her shoulders. Then he went back to hugging her, resting his chin on her head.

“Just had my call with Jordan,” Hennessy said.

Ronan tried not to tense, because she’d notice. Probably she’d notice how hard he was trying not to react either way. “Everything cool?”

She’d woken him up instead of waiting until morning. She’d brought him out here instead of snuggling in the bedroom. She was shaking. Something _must_ have happened.

“Everything’s fine,” Hennessy said. “I’m seeing her on Monday.”

Ronan paused. “Alright. Is she okay?”

“She’s fine. It’s just time.”

“Okay,” Ronan said. He didn’t think that she wanted to be talked out of it. She hadn’t danced around the revelation the way she did with topics she tried to avoid. This nervousness was rooted in something else - fear of screwing up, maybe?

Hennessy said, “You’re coming with me.”

“What.”

“You heard me.”

“I have work on Monday.”

“You have work on Monday _night,”_ Hennessy corrected. “I’m visiting her in the afternoon. You’ll miss an entire, oh, two hours of sleep. If you can’t bear such a hardship then call in sick, you massive pissbaby.”

Hennessy had an uncanny ability to remember Ronan’s schedule only when it suited her. It was one of her most annoying qualities.

Instead of arguing, Ronan just asked, “Why am I coming?”

“So I don’t chicken out.”

He scoffed. “I’ll drop you off, then. Idle in the driveway and make sure you ring the doorbell and everything. Be a real bastard about it.”

“I’ll feel better with you there.”

This was a transparent attempt to appeal to his protective side. It was possible she was using one of her old tricks to play the damsel in distress. It was equally likely that she’d picked the phrasing up from Gansey or Adam.

“I know you’re manipulating me,” Ronan said, unimpressed. “But fine. She knows I’m coming with?”

“She will,” Hennessy said, “when she sees you.”

“For fuck’s sake.”

“I’ve got to drop the bomb sometime.”

“You haven’t _told her?”_

_“You_ didn’t tell Declan.”

Now Ronan pulled back, the surprise melting into irritation. “Declan and I don’t have a fucking heart-to-heart every goddamn week.”

“Fuck off.” Hennessy shrugged the blanket off and stood up. “Don’t come with me, then. See what I fucking care. I can handle myself. I’m going out to smoke.”

“No, hang on.” Ronan caught her hand. “Why haven’t you told her?”

“Didn’t come up.”

Ronan’s expression could have frozen lava.

“I don’t need to justify what I do,” Hennessy said, although the sentiment was defensive enough to undermine her point. “It’s not something you would understand.”

“Try me.”

She held his gaze for a solid ten seconds. When he didn’t back down, she sighed and resumed her seat on the cushion, laying her head against his shoulder. “You smell nice. What is that - sandalwood? Reminds me of one of those colognes people wear at black-tie events. Significantly more pleasant than Axe body spray. I approve.”

“I have no fucking clue what you’re smelling. I’m not going with you if it’s gonna start drama.”

“I do not intend to start drama.”

“Just to ‘drop the bomb.’”

“Yeah.”

“Because you couldn’t mention it on the phone.”

“Mm.”

“Even though it’s been months.”

“Look,” Hennessy said. “This, all of this - I don’t need her assuming I’m doing it to playact the perfect soulmate. She’ll never believe I'm sincere. She’ll think it’s the latest self-help trend, that I’m going to fuck it all the second I get bored. I don’t exactly have a good track record. I need her to believe me.”

“And introducing me fixes that how, exactly?”

“You have a certain charm,” she said, and grinned. “No one can meet you and think I’d _ever_ want to be a good soulmate.”

-

Ronan drove his car to Jordan’s place, since he wasn’t suicidal enough to give Hennessy the keys. The journey meant taking the subway, which in turn meant standing on the platform where she’d almost died. It was far from the first time Ronan had been back, but as they waited for the train, his hand tightened involuntarily around hers anyway.

The GPS directed him to a sprawling suburb ten miles from downtown. He navigated slowly through a group of neighborhood kids playing kickball with chalk boundaries sketched on the actual road. Apparently there wasn’t enough traffic on the block to warrant concern.

This wasn’t the kind of neighborhood he could ever picture Hennessy in. 

He definitely couldn’t picture her in Jordan’s house, marveling slightly as he pulled into the driveway. It was a pale blue cookie-cutter home with the same architecture as every other house on the street. But the garden and small porch were both decorated with a wild array of wind chimes, pinwheels, glass bottles, and hanging plants. There was even a goddamn _porch swing._

“So some apples fall ninety-three million miles from the tree,” he observed.

“You see why I can’t live in the guest room.”

“Someday I’m gonna drag you to the farmhouse I grew up in,” Ronan said. “It’s gonna make this place look like a corporate skyscraper.”

“I think that was a murder threat. Are you threatening to murder me, Lynch?”

“Only on days that end in ‘y.’”

Hennessy offered a wan smile, but it disappeared quickly. Her fingernails drummed an erratic rhythm against the base of the window. She stared out at the yard, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth, her eyes narrow.

Ronan killed the engine. She made zero move to exit.

“Last chance to chicken out,” he said. “You know I’ll let you. If you wanted someone who’d stick to his guns, you should’ve brought Adam.”

“I might puke.”

“Not in my fucking car you don’t.” Ronan got out and moved around to open her door, because he was a gentleman. “Hurl on the ground.”

Hennessy unbuckled her seatbelt and leaned just far enough to rest her forehead against Ronan’s chest.

“Do not puke on me,” Ronan said. 

“One moment. I’m dizzy.”

His first instinct was to touch her hair, but she’d spent an ungodly amount of time teasing it out this morning, and he doubted she’d appreciate him ruining the work. He braced his hand on her shoulder instead. “Hey,” he said quietly. “We don’t gotta go in. You can reschedule. Do a coffee date instead. Less pressure. It’s fine.”

“No,” Hennessy said, and finally unfolded herself from the car. She pushed Ronan back a step with a palm on his chest. “No, I slept last night. I’m not fucking wasting it.”

Ronan didn’t point out that recently she’d been sleeping more often anyway, since it seemed like the beginning of an argument. She _had_ gone the extra mile in terms of prep. She’d fussed with her clothes and makeup for almost two hours - vanity, Ronan had learned, was a sign of improved mental health - and she’d eaten an assload of food from a coffeeshop drive-thru. There was nothing stopping her from acing the reunion. Except, potentially, her fear.

She wobbled a little as she set her boot on the brick pathway leading up to the porch. Ronan steadied her with a palm against her lower back. It was a question as much as an offer - she didn’t snarl at him, so he kept pace beside her.

Hennessy mounted the shallow steps and rang the bell. Then she stepped back, tilting her chin up. Her fists clenched at her sides. Her breathing quickened.

“You’re gonna fucking pass out,” Ronan muttered, and then the lock flipped and the door opened.

Jordan was obviously Hennessy’s twin, but so far from a mirror it was laughable. Her physicality was different - different like her voice had been on the phone. Her shoulders were relaxed, her smile easy. She’d braided her hair and gathered the strands into a bun, tied with a bright orange scarf. 

She also wore a paint-stained yellow t-shirt with a studded leather skirt that was probably meant for clubbing. Silky purple gloves hid her fingers from view, but her hands were open, nothing like Hennessy’s clenched fists.

She looked friendly. More than that, there was something about the sparkle in her eyes, or the glow in her cheeks. _Healthy,_ Ronan thought, unbidden, immediately followed by, _What? Don’t be a fucking dick._

“So, um,” Hennessy said, uncertain in ways she never allowed herself to be, “hey.”

Jordan hugged her fiercely. The kitchen door was raised about a foot from the porch, so Jordan had an extra few inches even with Hennessy’s heels. She didn’t appear to care.

Ronan took a step back to give them space. After a second of surprise, Hennessy hugged Jordan back just as hard, her breath audibly hitching.

“Hey,” Jordan said, releasing Hennessy and taking a step back. Examining Hennessy at arm’s length, she added, “Have you been eating? You look like hell. I made food.”

“I look like the queen of hell,” Hennessy retorted, but without heat. “Fuck off.”

“And I see you brought a guest.” Jordan gave Ronan a quick once-over, far less scrutinizing than she’d been toward Hennessy. Her enthusiasm dimmed. “Last night’s hookup? Hitchhiker you found on the way over? Serial murderer?”

Ronan suddenly liked her a little more.

Hennessy shot an appealing look in Ronan’s direction. He just arched an eyebrow. _I did not dig this hole,_ said the eyebrow. _I’m not helping you out of it._

When a more pleading look didn’t move him, she huffed and turned back to Jordan. “He’s, you know.” Hennessy waved a hand. “My son-of-a-bitch other half.”

Ronan did have to give Jordan credit for the quickness with which she masked her surprise. She assessed him, keen, a hell of a lot more interested than when he’d been “boyfriend of the week” two seconds ago.

“Damn,” Jordan said finally. “He got a brother?”

Hennessy laughed, a half-gasp of relief, like she’d been running. “Trust me,” she said, “you don’t want the brother.”

“You really don’t,” Ronan confirmed.

“Pity. Well, come in. Wipe your boots,” Jordan added, to Ronan. “I’m not a zookeeper.”

Ronan wiped his boots on the welcome mat and stepped inside. Wide porch windows brought in natural afternoon sunlight. The kitchen walls were adorned with canvases and prints, while a desktop computer perched atop a table in a darker corner. The dining table matched the rickety model that he and Adam had from Ikea, and it looked ready to buckle under the weight of dozens of different snack foods.

“There’s a lasagna in the oven,” Jordan said, “should be done in twenty minutes. I’ll wrap the leftovers for you.”

“Oh, _that’s_ what smells so good.” Hennessy grabbed a box of Cheez-Its and tore it open, as though she hadn’t just eaten a bagel and cream cheese and a doughnut and a latte. “You are my fucking hero.”

“That was a surprisingly easy achievement,” Jordan said. She turned to Ronan and offered a hand. “Jordan, but I assume you know that.”

Since he was trying to behave, he shook her hand. “Ronan Lynch. All my marks are filled, just so you know.”

“You’ll forgive me if I refrain from hugging you regardless.”

“I would be unbelievably fucking freaked out if you tried to hug me.”

“Those are new,” Hennessy observed, nodding at the gloves. Ronan wasn’t sure whether she was informing him or asking Jordan. Possibly both.

“Oh, I just don’t have the time to mingle these days. Far too settled to invite any newcomers inside. My old soul is exceptionally fond of being a homebody.”

Hennessy rearranged several of the snack boxes, assembling a miniature tower so that she could sit on the cleared space. The uneven table legs wobbled even more dangerously. There were four perfectly good dining chairs open for use, but no, she apparently had to test her sister’s furniture first.

“So how is June?” Hennessy asked.

“Not here,” Jordan replied, as though answering an entirely different question.

“Oh, thank God.”

“She has opted to use strategic scheduling to avoid your presence. Indefinitely.”

Ronan sensed messy history here, but all Hennessy said was, “Good.”

Jordan’s mouth flattened. “I’ll tell her you’re filled with remorse. Poetically remorseful. Excruciatingly remorseful. So remorseful it’s unbelievable.”

“I _am_ sorry,” Hennessy offered. “But I’m _not_ nice.”

“She’s also not nice, as far as you’re concerned. Funny how that works. Stay apart for my sake. I am an angel who doesn’t deserve this.”

“You _are_ an angel,” Hennessy said. “You should have told me she’s being an ice queen. We could have met elsewhere. Spared you the headache.”

“It would have caused significantly more headache not to be allowed to have my sister in my home. June and I have communicated.” Jordan snagged a bag of snacks from the table and offered it to Ronan. “Pretzel?”

He wasn’t hungry, but he opened the bag and stuck a few pretzels in his mouth, because he was still trying to behave.

“We spoke on the phone once, I believe,” Jordan said, taking the opportunity now that he couldn’t interrupt. “Ronan Lynch. I know the name - you share Adam’s lease.”

Ronan chewed and swallowed. “You and Adam know each other?” This was news to him, but maybe Adam had joined one of Hennessy’s midnight calls.

“Not in the slightest. I want to talk to you. Alone.”

“I can’t believe this,” Hennessy said. “You’re going to threaten him, and you somehow think I will relinquish my God-given right to observe? I love it when you’re scary.”

Jordan opened a kitchen cupboard near the sink and removed a small plastic package. Cat treats, according to the label. “Artie is in kitty jail upstairs. There’s an oil layer drying in the living room and she insists on signing it with her delicate little paws. She’s furious with me about the imprisonment. Go keep her company? She’ll be relieved to see a friendly face.”

“Unbelievable. You’ve found the one distraction compelling enough to keep me away,” Hennessy said. “You diabolical bitch. I’ve missed that fucking furball.” She accepted the treats. “Come get me when you’re finished. Don’t eat him.”

“I’ll do my best.”

As Hennessy disappeared through the door to the living room and, presumably, the staircase, Jordan took a seat in one of the dining chairs. Ronan settled on the other side of the table, moving a box of Thin Mints and a bag of Cheetos to clear the sight line.

“So,” Jordan said, propping her chin up on her hand, her elbow resting on the table, _“you’re_ my sister’s soulmate.”

“Looks that way.”

“Whose idea was it for you to come?”

“Oh, hers. Definitely hers. I could not give less of a shit about any of this.”

Jordan raised an eyebrow. “And she brought you because...?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“Because she wanted me to meet you?” Jordan pressed. “Or because she wanted the extra support?”

“I’m not a mind reader.”

“Right. You don’t want to tell me her business,” Jordan surmised, which was giving Ronan more credit than he was due. “That’s fine. Will she be devastated if we don’t get along?”

“Doubt it.”

“Oh, good. Then I don’t need to pretend to like you.”

Ronan bit down on his cheek in a fruitless effort to stifle his smile. “I would _never_ expect you to pretend to like me.”

“This soulmate development has, admittedly, left me with more questions than answers. You’ve been together the whole time?”

“Look,” Ronan said, “for what it’s worth, I don’t think she was keeping shit from you for stupid reasons. With how our talk went-”

“I remember it vividly, yes. Perhaps not the best first impression anyone’s ever made.”

“I fucked up,” Ronan said. “I haven’t fucked up like that since. Not with her. Once was enough.”

Jordan studied him for a long minute. She kicked her chair back on two legs, folding her hands behind her head. When she spoke, it was careful. Measured. “I imagine both of you might still be in the honeymoon phase. At the risk of pointing out that water is wet, my sister can be... a handful.”

“Yeah,” Ronan said, “I promise I got that.”

“And yet.” Jordan dropped the chair back to the ground. “I’m experiencing a certain level of cognitive dissonance. Judging by the conversations I’ve had with her, I would guess that her current situation is excellent for her health. And then judging by the minimal amount I know about you, well.”

“I love her,” Ronan said, because it was true, and because Jordan deserved to know.

“That’s far from enough.”

“I don’t think I’m cool with this.” Drawing the line now was better than escalating an argument. “Talking about her when she’s not here like this, I mean. Ask _her_ whether it’s been good for her. Ask me all the other invasive shit you’re wondering. I’m open.”

“All right.” Jordan didn’t hesitate. “Criminal record?”

“Nothing important.”

“History of violence?”

“Nothing that affects her.”

Jordan’s gaze darkened.

“Okay, fuck it,” Ronan said. “You got any Post-It notes around here? Scrap paper?”

Jordan got up, retrieving a ballpoint pen and a small pad of sticky notes from a desk drawer. She slid them across the kitchen table and sat back down, her stare unwavering.

Ronan scrawled a few lines, doing his best to keep the handwriting legible. “Here,” he said, tearing off the top note and sticking it to the table. “Full name, address, phone number, license plate, vehicle make and model. I don’t have the VIN memorized. I can get it if you want. Now for Adam’s-”

“I don’t need Adam’s,” Jordan interrupted.

“I don’t answer my phone. If you need to call-”

“I already have his number.”

“Right,” Ronan said, remembering. “You’ve looked at our lease.”

“Only the information available through the public record.”

“And you did this why?”

Jordan sighed. “For a brief period, his identity was the only lead I had into Heloise’s whereabouts. I spent some time acquiring all the information I could get.”

Ronan inclined his head. “But you’ve never come snooping around the apartment.” It was a guess more than anything; there was no way for him to know where Jordan had or hadn’t been.

“I’m trying to-” She closed her eyes. “I haven’t always been - I know she’s living her own life. If she wants privacy, I’ll respect that. I only needed somewhere to look in the event that she vanished again.”

Fair enough. “Text Adam if you’re worried she’s dead.”

“Not you?”

“I hate texting.”

Jordan nodded. “Thank you,” she said. He’d given her surface-level emergency contact information, but more pointedly, he’d given her everything she needed to get him arrested if he hurt her sister. Judging by the first conversation they’d had, Ronan thought this gesture would go further than meaningless platitudes.

“You are serious about her, yeah?” Jordan added. “You’re not planning to run the moment things become difficult?”

Things had started out far more difficult than Jordan knew. Ronan sure as hell wasn’t going to enlighten her. “She’s family,” he said instead. “There is no fucking way I’m leaving.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Got any interrogation questions left?”

“I’ll call you if I think of anything else.”

“Cool,” Ronan said. “Pretty sure I’ve done my part, then. You two solve your own shit.”

-

Artemisia was a fluffy white cat with the tail of a feather duster and the personality of a spoiled princess. She also might have been the only creature alive who didn’t think Hennessy was a monster. The affection had, of course, been achieved through bribery, but that didn’t mean anything.

Hennessy slipped into Jordan’s room and closed the door before the kitty could rocket past. She took a seat by the wall and crinkled the treat bag invitingly.

Artie trotted over, her tail quivering with an exclamation point of excitement.

God, Hennessy had missed this fucking cat.

She spent several blissful minutes with the solid weight purring in her lap. The leather and lace outfit she’d so painstakingly assembled was coated in white fur by the time Jordan came upstairs, but Hennessy couldn’t find it in her to be annoyed.

Jordan opened the door and leaned against the frame. Ronan stood just behind her. The cat paid no mind to the newfound escape route, curled as she was atop Hennessy’s legs, sniffing at the closed treat bag.

“I’m heading out,” Ronan said. “Let me know when to pick you up.”

Hennessy arched her eyebrows. “Are you being kicked out?”

“Nope.”

“Are you running away? Jordan cannot be _that_ scary. _Were_ you that scary? Did you record the diatribe? I need immediate video playback.”

“I’m just gonna get in the way,” Ronan said. “You don’t need me here.”

“I-” Hennessy wasn’t sure she agreed with this assessment. It wasn’t that she felt stronger with Ronan, exactly. She was just less worried about the potential of shattering. Fragility had fewer consequences when he was nearby to sweep up the pieces.

Ronan’s brow furrowed. He didn’t speak, but he tilted his head, flashing a silent question over Jordan’s shoulder. _Unless you do? I’ll stay if you do._

“I won’t bite,” Jordan said, very gently, intuiting Hennessy’s fear just like she always did.

“I’ll be fine,” Hennessy affirmed, swallowing the unease. “Go egg a few houses.”

Ronan snorted, shoved his hands in his pockets, and disappeared back down the hallway. As he left, Jordan stepped fully inside and eased the door closed. She sat beside Hennessy, their knees touching, and reached out to stroke Artemisia’s fur.

“She’s gotten bigger since I was here last,” Hennessy said.

“She’s a con artist is what she is,” Jordan replied. “Tricks June and I into giving her second breakfast about three times a week. You’d think we could come up with a system that works, but no. She sabotages our every effort. She learned to erase the whiteboard with her tail.”

“That’s my little gremlin.” Hennessy scritched the kitty around the neck and was rewarded by a louder purr. “Learned from the best. What did you say to Ronan?”

“You weren’t listening?”

“Did you want me to?” she asked, surprised.

“No, I just half-expected you to. Anyway, it was nothing interesting. I asked the usual questions, he gave semi-satisfactory answers, we moved on.”

“You don’t like him,” Hennessy said. This wasn’t a disappointment - she hadn’t exactly expected Jordan and Ronan to get along. God knew she had enough preliminary evidence to the contrary.

Jordan hummed. She concentrated very hard on Artie’s fur, raking through the thick coat with her fingertips. Hennessy gave her a minute, but she didn’t speak - she wouldn’t meet Hennessy’s eyes.

Hennessy bit her lip. “Are you upset with me?”

“What?” Now Jordan did glance up. “Why would I be?”

“I didn’t tell you.”

“I understand why you didn’t,” Jordan said. “I’m not upset with you. Or him. He just makes me nervous.”

“He does?” Hennessy had been incensed by Jordan’s initial suspicion of Ronan; she didn’t think she needed to tread that territory again. “I wouldn’t be near him if he made _me_ nervous.”

“Oh, he’s an asshole for sure,” Jordan said. “But so are you. I’m mostly concerned by the scars on his arms.”

Now it was Hennessy’s turn to concentrate on the cat.

“You must have noticed them - you’ve been around him enough.”

Hennessy shrugged.

“It’s not on you to save people,” Jordan added, as if Hennessy had ever tried to save anyone in her life.

“No,” Hennessy said. “No, you’ve got it backwards.”

“How so?”

“He’s the one saving me. He saved me.” She swallowed. “I don’t want to talk about it. Don’t make me talk about it.”

Jordan leaned against her. Her breathing had changed, going rough and uneven. “Are you all right now?”

“I’m getting there.”

“I’m so glad to have you home.”

“Me too.”

“I need you here.”

Something in Jordan’s voice caught Hennessy’s attention. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” When Hennessy opened her mouth, Jordan added, firmly, “Nothing I want to talk about. Not right now.”

Which left a lot of possibilities for Hennessy to chew on. She tried to set the distress aside.

“I missed you like crazy,” Jordan said. “God, I can’t believe you’re home. I can’t believe you’re here. You don’t know how much I-”

“No,” Hennessy interrupted, because she did know. She absolutely did fucking know. “I promise I do.”


End file.
